I don’t know if hindsight is quite right. There were people raising alarms about this when Chrome initially came out and repeatedly as it grew in popularity. Especially when sites started requiring Chrome. It’s just they were dismissed as conspiracy theorists or brushed aside because right now Chrome is faster and the present is all that matters. This was 100% pushed by tech enthusiasts and web developers… the average person would’ve otherwise stuck with their OS default browser.
I’m not trying to correct you. It’s just a sequence of events I’ve seen play out repeatedly and I’m not sure if there’s a solution. Most recently I’ve seen it with Bambu Lab locking down their 3D printers. Prior to that Autodesk yanking the Fusion 360 enthusiast licenses.
Maybe there isn’t a solution. There’s a lot of UX work that isn’t fun to do and so it’s hard to get volunteers to do it. It’s hard to do product management in a distributed group of volunteers in general. So, companies that can afford to bankroll projects often gain traction with performance or usability gains and suck away attention and funding from open source options. Then when they amass enough of the user base they flip the switch and now folks are stuck. The cost of changing is often prohibitively high and the OSS option is generally far behind at that point.
I think people are bad at thinking longer term. Or maybe they just prefer immediate gratification. In any event, absent a shift in human behavior I expect we’ll see this sort of situation to continue to play out. It’d just be nice if folks were less antagonistic about it when those concerned raise that alarm.