It's easy to take that stance in jest .. when it has no material impact on you. But if your life was uprooted by the decision of an executive because they made what was a "good faith" decision for the benefit of the shareholder, then I'd wager you may feel differently.
User's care about privacy when they understand the threat and impact. The issue is most user's don't understand this, especially when it comes to use of products like Meta where on the surface, everything appears harmless.
For us, the reason is we're primarily a Salesforce company and rely on the Heroku Connect product to facilitate bidirectional syncing between Salesforce and PostgreSQL (which also requires Heroku PG).
One of the biggest benefits to this product -- aside from the syncing mechanism -- is a bypass of Salesforce's extremely limiting (and expensive) API limits.
I don't have a fancy workflow per se, but I have started leaning into git workspaces more which has really been a boon with Elixir (especially in large projects where compile times can be in the many tens of seconds).
Opus 4.5 with Elixir has been remarkably good for me. I've been writing Elixir in production since ~2018 and it continues to amaze me at the quality of code it produces.
I've been tweaking my skills to avoid nested cases, better use of with/do to control flow, good contexts, etc.
It's not perfect/ideal, but you can basically accomplish keyword filtering using a shortcut powered by a message automation. I've done something similar where during the political season I would have all incoming texts (from unknown numbers) run through an LLM to determine if it was a political message. If so, it'd get deleted immediately.
But that is unfortunately a nuclear option that should not need to be taken to perform such a thing. Like the op, I have no interest in Shorts, especially considering the type of content that seems to proliferate that format.
However, I feel like YouTube does a genuinely good job — at least for me personally — of curating my feed with videos I have genuine interest in; mostly being tech talks and home DIY.
I'd hate to lose the discoverability I currently have for the sake of having to disable a feature like Shorts.