Have said before that the economics for companies like NSO are favorable because countries and regimes with resource wealth, who do not need to maintain a sophisticated civil service to stay in power, need the technical capability that such a platform provides. Companies like this provide that. It's a domestic spy agency as a service.
Awful? Absolutely, but I'd argue these objections reduce to "interception capabilities for me and not for thee," as western domestic spy agencies can just send a fax to your telco and get the same access. That is, the U.S. doesn't need NSO because it has the FISA stamp pad.
I'm very much a privacy advocate who has in one way or another worked closely to the key surveillance issues of the day for years, and so to defend NSO at all feels absurd, but the devil must be given his due.
Sure, NSO and the former HackingTeam and even Stratfor were great activist targets, but from the perspective of a state or a regime who buys an NSO-like service, N-GO's are just another foreign funded operator fighting a proxy war for policy leverege on behalf of their home governments and companies. They aren't secular colonial missionaries, (or perhaps, that's precisely what they are) they're running a playbook[1].
It's hard to separate NSO from Israeli policy because of how close their industry and military are linked, but I also think the objections to Israel's involvement itself reduce to how it is the last new free and independent nation state in a time where the nation state as thing itself is being wound up by the very class of academics/NGO's who militate against Israel's sovereignty. The academic/NGO anti-Israel thing has a lot of old entrenched anti-semitism, but the most reliable filter to identify what bothers them about Israel's involvement in this platform is NGOs are motivated by academic anti-sovereignty. These spy agencies as a service like NSO provide sovereignty to unfavorable countries, and Israel benefits strategically from preserving the sovereignty of nation states, no matter how repugnant. That's a painful steelman argument to make on behalf of the very abusive surveillance I have worked personally in my career to prevent, but when I see what amounts to selective privacy astroturfing using artists I like as propaganda mascots, the whole thing leaves a bad taste.
The skepticism I had with the university affiliated project that first uncovered Pegasus was they seemed really interested in foreign abuses but had not done anything on domestic surveillance issues, or even investigated those countries' influence on their own, which made them a para-governmental org using the cover of a loosely academic NGO to play spy games. To me the whole enterprise is seedy.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Dictatorship-Democracy-Gene-Sharp/dp/...