> I'm not sure when it happened

I know exactly when it happened: when people stopped buying software.

When you had to walk into a store, pick up a box, read the bullet points on the back, and pay a decent chunk of cash for that program, you were incentivized to do at least a little research and ensure you were getting something useful. You would be stuck with it (and with exactly it in the form you bought it, without hope for an endless stream of updates).

That in turn incentivized software companies to make products that were worth real money to people and to care about their reputation.

Once everything because free (sorry, not free, ad-driven), that whole calculus went out the window. What it was replaced with has a lot of upsides. If every app on my phone cost me $50 with another $20 for every upgrade I've ever gotten, I surely couldn't afford half of them, and I'm in a better income bracket than much of the world.

But it has as a huge downside that it no longer centers the experience of individual humans with agency. Instead, users are treat as a sort of aggregate stream of fungible attention units. A software change that alienates a million users but garners you 1.1 new users is a net win.

Companies are longer trying to maximize users, they are trying to maximize usage. You exist only to be a drop in a bucket of liquid attention.

This is it. When software was built to provide legitimate, tangible value to the user.