> The emotionally manipulative things like “pay the rent”, “tip theft”

Those are accurate descriptions of what's going on.

> With all the modern corporate doublespeak trainings, there is 0 chance that something would be called “desperation score” in us business.

Not at all unrealistic. These are meant to be internal.

> (unions, your delivery guy homeless)

When was the last time you took an Uber? They don't smell that well, and it's a known fact _a lot_ of drivers live in their cars.

> Again, Instacart, for example, says that 100% of tip goes to driver. If it’s not, they just painting crazy big target on their backs.

This only means that the entire tip amount goes to the driver, which is accurate. It doesn't preclude their other sources of revenue from being reduced, as described by OP.

> but that one guy has exposure to all of that, I doubt it.

Very plausible he/she does. I worked for a similar company and as a software engineer of no particular rank I had access to everything, incl. code, documents describing features, cross-team meetings where those were discussed, etc. I also had friends across the teams who would talk about what they are working on all the time.