"Our economic system fundamentally chooses to reward such behavior". This is true, but what people seem to fail to grasp is that rewarding such behavior == buying the product. If people simply didn't buy it, they wouldn't do it. It's really that simple. It may be hard to not buy, of course. The alternatives may be worse, there may be downsides to not buying, etc. But nothing else will really be effective.

Sure, but there's a power disparity here. I think the clearest example is smart TVs where there have been examples of consumers buying a TV, and then having ads retroactively added to the product a year later. There's not much a consumer could to avoid that. It's our regulatory environment allowing that.

Do people really have a choice though? Many people don't choose what OS they use for work, and even when one can pick, the environment we exist in is one where being less productive is often hard to afford.

Another instance where companies can have more leverage than consumers is gaming. Console exclusives are a thing because they work; not giving consumers the option to play Pokemon on anything but the Nintendo Switch drives switch sales. Microsoft is better off working with other gaming companies to ensure Windows keeps being dominant, than building an OS to gamer's preferences.

I think time has proven many times that consumers aren't always good regulators for the market. The market is best regulated by organized entities.

If people stopped buying cigarettes there would be no tobacco industry. But the true cost of smoking is not something that the smoker realizes until it's already too late. That's why we had to have huge public health campaigns to deter people from smoking, because the long-term effects aren't obvious when you're just stopping in at the corner store. We all live in our own little bubbles and it's often difficult to see how our actions, individual and collective, shape the world around us.

So does North Korea's. This is Goodhart's law in action - the metastasis of PM culture rewarding "engagement".

Consumers can make choices only if it is clear what the options are. In many cases, Microsoft hides behind weasel or made up words. And it takes a security researcher to peel back the layers of their bullshit.