Sadly this is what happens. Companies pull unpopular and anti-consumer moves all the time. They know most users either have needs the alternatives cannot provide, or that, overall, just caving in to their requests is by far going to be the most reasonable choice for their situation and time/willingness to learn something new.

This was made even worse by the fact that a product of the enshittification of everything is that many very young users have lost tech literacy. I am 25, but I frequently do offer tech support to users of every age range. Although I am still pretty young, I was definitely part of the older spectrum of gen Z, who grew up in the early 2000's - so you know the deal, Windows 2000/XP, eMule, having to manage local media libraries and burn rewriteable CDs, etc. Then, when we wanted to play together, things were not as straightforward as they were now. Someone had to host the server, and that someone had to get comfortable with open ports, upnp, etc. Someone needed to set up the TeamSpeak server and everybody else needed to set up the client. At the easiest, everybody needed to learn how to use Hamachi as a quick and dirty solution. We learned to get comfortable with computers from a very young age, and every nerd has engaged with piracy extensively, which was a whole set of lessons on computing on its own. The younger part of Gen Z and Gen Alpha both had increasingly less reason to use computers, and they have gotten used to getting all of their content from subscriptions.

We are at an awkward point where mass computer literacy peaked somewhere in the range of Millennials and Early Gen-Z - the people who grew up with a computer rather than with a smartphone - and then it took a nosedive right after. Many of the kids and young teens I have had to assist are positively at the same level of computer literacy as the average person the age of my parents. We are regressing hard. And those who can go online are not better. The communities and Discord servers that are managed by the current teens mostly have the strictest anti-piracy, anti-modding and anti-hacking rules I have ever seen. There seems to be a culture of "cleansing the Internet from the immoralities that people older than us" have done. I don't want to sound too old, but if the future of the future is an entire generation that was raised on extremely locked-down tech and who is frankly too technologically illiterate to do anything locally and not died down to a cloud service and half a million cute proprietary wrappers that abstract all of the complexity out to the point of not even making people ever have to know what a file or a directory is (!!) and that are mostly going around the Internet doing propaganda for the same things big tech vendors get their bottom line for... this is not good news for us, it's actually the big-tech companies behind this change whose mouths are watering just seeing this unfold.

I would like to be proven wrong.