They saw how Google providing absolutely terrible customer service for a very long time has done nothing to hurt their bottom line and decided to copy.
Given how good Proton is, I don't think it's useful to target Linux for most indie devs unless it's a one click build for multiple platforms. Even then, I've definitely had more issues with games with native Linux builds than Proton, where there's been a number of games I've set to use Proton over native to get better performance.
I'm a strong believer that PRs should be merged via a "squash and merge" strategy, with the singular commit being descriptive of the overall change and having a link back to the PR for deeper story analysis as needed. I'm also a staunch believer at this point that PRs should really focus on one thing as well. If when working on a bug you discover another semi-related bug? Open two PRs.
Let main be the story of how code got from point A to B, and PRs be the story of how each incremental step was made.
In terms of changing loot box contents, that has been going on for at least the past like 7+ years through "randomizers", though I think mostly used by speed runners.
The Republican plan for the federal government for decades has been to try to kneecap various agencies and departments so fully that they can't function well, go "look how poorly they operate! Time to close it down and let private sector handle it!"
I think that they've been fine with it so long as the stock price has continued to climb. If it starts to meaningfully fall, I'd except sentiment to more meaningfully change on him running multiple businesses/DOGE.
I'm happy to buy games, but once there's literally no legal way to get a game (or movie or show), then piracy is the only solution to keep that piece of media alive.
While I agree tooling could be better, while in grad school I found that a lot of academics / grad students don't know that any of the tooling even exists and never bothered to learn if and such tooling existed that could improve their life. Ditto with updating their language runtimes. It really seemed like they viewed code as a necessary evil they had to do to achieve their research goal.
Do you have a source for saying the monetary outlook is good? As far as I'm aware, advertising dollars has always been the lion's share of revenue, and he's tanked that and the valuation of the site has readily dropped.
Epic already does that and has a number of exclusives to their store, like Alan Wake 2. They also will pay devs to have it exclusive to their store for a year.
Private equity firms are already an absolute blight even before Musk's handling of Twitter. I've seen plenty of companies get purchased, completely gutted and then they try to extract maximum value from customers as quickly as possible before all customers abandon ship as the product(s) fall apart. They truly are scum.
Decisions like this have definitely ended up harming the movement more than helped ultimately. Him refusing to have gcc support that ended up pushing a lot of people to other compilers (llvm) and have sidelined gcc in many spaces.
When I TAed a CS1 course for a handful of years, I'd definitely say easily like 1/4 of the class would also end up needing a general primer of basic computer usage.
Ultimately, some people are just not interested in technology or using it efficiently.
There's also the issue that some number of people tossed into jail are there on suspect evidence and later exonerated, and then in the meantime, they lose their job, miss payments on stuff so it gets repossessed, and suffer inhumane conditions. Good luck to them to then struggle to get their life back on track.
The move to python 3 helped shake loose a number of text processing bugs with library I work on, that was never caught in python 2 with its loose goosy text type handling.