So why are we angry about that ? I mean the end result for the users are exactly the same, it matters only for bots.

Google have such a (justified) bad reputation that whatever they do, people assume it’s entishification. I don’t believed it is on that matter.

Privacy-wise, it enables them to track the result you click on.

Also, though more niche, it would make archived search result pages (e.g. on the Wayback Machine) less useful.

It's rather frustrating that after they crawled my website to use for their AI without my consent, and using that AI to slowly strangle my traffic, they're not happy that _other people_ are doing the same to them.

Yeah. I might be wrong but I think they only served direct links for a relatively short time in their history, early on in the 90's and in recent years with ping, which they used to track clicks anyway. At least half of their history they used either the 302 redirects or onmousedown link rewriting (which was terrible). And I'm not even starting on AMP.