Letting nature do its thing is a whole lot different than humans doing a similar act. We generally don’t condone cruelty to animals in lab environments or everyday life, even though predators maul and maim other species all the time.
do I have a choice in being one of those million if there’s no easy way to compile it myself?
You always have a choice. Just yesterday, I had an app’s documentation say “install brew so you can download our application and themes”. I noped right out of there and found a different application altogether.
Yes, I was leaving that exercise for the reader and you hit it out of the park. Being unable to consent, any sexual act performed on them by an able-minded adult human is rape.
What protocol are you using to connect to your mail service and what third-party apps do you need it to be compatible with? POP, IMAP, SMTP, or those protocols with various SSL/TLS implementations? Thunderbird will likely handle anything you throw at it, but I’m at a loss when you start talking about third-party apps without more info.
Yes, that’s just how open source works. Of course they always serve at the pleasure of the community, otherwise forks would happen. Nobody said otherwise. As the “Usage” section of that article implies, the “benevolent” bit comes from the feedback loop of a happy community supporting their dictator-for-life.