I don’t like Ubuntu because of their forcing method to use Snap package manager.
I don’t like Manjaro because of its poor dependency management. Many dependencies are not declared, so that if you update a package, it won’t update the undeclared dependency and it won’t work any longer. You have to update everything or nothing, and when disk space becomes low, updating everything at once is impossible.
This would help them to improve the algorithms and make it worse. An active defense could be to keep the ads visible and boycott the announcers, so that they lose more money when they pay for advertising.
When I see this, the only viable option I see is to close the site and boycott it. Any other choice would encourage more companies to do this blackmail.
The model is open source, but not the whole site. It was made to help in programmation, so sometimes it makes funny answers when you ask something that has nothing to do with programmation and it tries to answer giving you a Python code.
A better advice would be: Don’t install updates when you have a class to attend and assignments to do. There is always a risk of breaking something on any OS.