>Instead I see a future of enshittified products being swiftly replaced by solo motivated people - or small teams. Suddenly we are back to disruption. Instead of "Google sucks, all I can do is complain on my blog" you can say "Google sucks, I made this alternative give it a shot".

There's practical limits here. You're not going to be building your own search engine any time soon that challenges Google's, or even Bing's.

However, if you want to replace Google Photos, you can absolutely do that with Immich or Photoprism. It won't be trivial though: you'll need to build your own server (or create an instance somewhere), do a lot of setup, figure out how to allow access to your server from the internet so your phone app works and your friends can also view photo albums in links you send them, etc. (assuming you want to replicate all these GPhotos features). But it is do-able, and many people have done it with the existing software and guides.

OsmAnd is an interesting project (and not really Free BTW), but it doesn't do important basic things like give real-time traffic updates.

So I think some things are more easily done DIY than others, but as people work on it, more and more things can potentially be done on systems you control yourself.