I'm failing to see why they didn't just adopt Private Access Tokens (not that they're great either), where they could have at least:

- pretended that it wasn't all about invading peoples' privacy.

- done a good ol' fashioned "but Apple does it"

- pretended to be standards-oriented

- advertised it as something completely transparent to the end-user

Seems like that would've caused a lot less backlash while still achieving the goal of having some form of device attestation -- but I'm guessing that's not the real goal.

It doesn't fundamentally solve anything. You want to be able to identify a specific person or at least a relatively expensive device so that if you ban them they stay banned.

"pretended" ... do they even care any more?

Not Invented Here Syndrome?