What happened is that the computing industry was acquired by the advertising industry.

What kept things sane for a long time was the focus on products. Someone made something and sold it to end users. The end users had to be kept happy. That leads to a sane industry.

Now, most of the big names in computing are ad-supported. That's a completely different dynamic. The hype is the product. The user is the enemy.

On August 9, 2006, Eric Schmidt, head of Google, spoke at the Search Engine Strategies conference.[1] Before that, "search engine optimization" was considered a scumbag business, and it was the job of search engine companies to fight it. On that day, Google made it legitimate and turned evil.

[1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/google-ceos-new-paradigm-cloud...