There has to be more to it. Even services I pay for (the rare ones that don’t also spam my experience with ads) pull from a grab bag of bizarre user hostile quirks.

I think it's that the mentality has invaded the medium of the web. Capturing users/audience is a way to demonstrate "value". Services we pay for want to show wall street how loyal their customer are.

Each auto company want's to have an app store rather than having users just directly connecting and using their phones as the car's infotainment system.

It's all misguided.