First the money was in the hardware. Then, the money was in the software. Then, the money was in the services. Now, the money is in the data you can harvest from the users.
If being a sponge for ads, and a source of data to sell and use for training LLMs, is not your thing, using computer systems produced by for profit companies is probably out.
Enshitification isn’t driven by some new and unique greed. It’s the only way left to earn money in the space. Customers WANT subsidized hardware running free software and cloud services. If MS doesn’t give them that somebody else will and that will be that.
I don’t want to blame customers for all this. But to most folks trading something they didn’t know had value (their data and attention) for something that they know has value (software and services) seems like an awesome deal. The corps are following the customers to some extent, and we have to acknowledge that.