I’ve seen this same thing happen with Python’s type hints. Turns out giving an “escape hatch” type for devs who have no clue what the type actually is leads to a lot of useless type hints.
I usually agree with his takes, but I can’t watch more than a minute and a half of a video of his, because it’s always an unscripted rant. It’s fine though, he usually gets his point across in the first minute anyway, and then repeats himself for another ten minutes.
I think you’re spot on. It fits right in to the whole “enshittification” topic that Doctorow wrote about. Everyone started using streaming services like Netflix because it offered such a great user experience; now that they have the user base, unfortunately we are now at the point where Netflix has every motivation to make the platform as shitty as possible to milk as much money from their users as they can.
Companies are using subscription models because it has proven to be far more profitable than a one-time purchase. Why sell the product to each person just once when you can sell it to them over and over again? You no longer have to constantly develop new products and versions, and you now only have to maintain your existing product.
I don’t think that necessarily holds true for OSS. The average user with no development experience wanting to use an open source project doesn’t mean it will always develop faster.