Long gone are the days when I used be excited to read update notes for new features... Now I just hope they don't god damn force an update on me.

Somewhere along the line, maybe the early to mid 2000's they stopped making products "for" the end-user and flipped it around so the end-user (their data) is now the product, and the customers are governments, corporations, and share holders.

That's part of the reason why new community oriented projects are way more interesting to me now than most software. There are some outliers in the space who still have dedicated people in their craft rather than for money but it is fewer and farther between.

Absolutely. Although, this is just making old technology worse because web 3.0 and AI aren't performing to corpo expectations.

That's what happens when you aren't the (sole) paying customer.