They're right. Embrace, Extend, Extinguish and Enshittification have been the core experiences of digital life with corporations in charge of platforms.
My hope is that LLMs will help open source developers provide reasonable alternatives to the gatekeeping and spyware that corporations are now making their bread and butter. Example: Recent tried to use Unity LTS for a small project - the software is a joke now, basic functionality is broken out of the box. A couple of hours with an LLM and I had all the features I needed using a more lightweight library, monogame. Not an operating system, but I'm hoping the pattern will continue as LLMs get more proficient at code - the moat of "this is hard and laborious to do" will be drained.
An issue is that it’s not only the corpos, there’s also an increase of individuality that has become the norm.
For example, try to learn from an online resource and you’ll see that the most popular sources (YouTubers, twitchers, etc) are all preparing a rug pull to a non free resource, slipping undisclosed ads as content or straight up selling snake oil.
I grew up assuming that a random guy on the internet had always genuine intentions, even those who were assholes. Now the default is either a paid account, a bot, or someone trying to grind for personal gain. Everything’s adversarial.