What's the user appeal of Apple news or whatever the Google equivalent is? From the outside looking in the value is the feed, but that seems super creepy to me.

It is an awful lot of power to give these companies to decide how we use their devices to interact with the world _and_ how we view the world.

I don't want anyone curating the current events or long-form I read. I want to see the whole buffet and choose myself, even sampling the unsavory ones from time-to-time to keep myself in check.

Huh? With millions of pieces of content to choose from a day some kind of curation is inevitable.