Obsidian has been around for years at this point. It's completely free to use without limitations on functionality. They make money by charging for sync, but are happy to point out that there are free options to sync data.
So where are these anti-user features? Why does the business model lead to them? "Not open source" doesn't count.
I have no idea what features are "anti-user", but I would note that it is not free for commercial use. I'm paying for Obsidian sync and still can't use Obsidian for work. (At the moment, I'm using logseq there.)
An example of an anti-user feature I think Obsidian might fall into is making the end-user the product for the free tier. That's just how those business models work, they are inherently anti-user because the user is the product.
FOSS allows you to choose to be free tier or pay for their services. The difference is in the free tier: you can do the leg work and hack together your own systems to match their paid services (namely public hosting). Its sort of a promise that you can use, audit, help improve, and love the free product without having to be concerned about forfeiting your privacy or security.
Additionally, FOSS projects always benefit from community auditing of the code, increasing the reliability and security of the software instead of relying on a few individuals to catch bugs.
Anyways all this to say "not FOSS" might not count itself, but implies there are other anti-user features at play.
I'd definitely be worried about that if they had investors, but as far as I know, it's entirely self-owned, and they are happy if they make enough money to support their small staff of (currently) six. Not even sure all of them take a salary , for that matter.
Outside investors seem to me to be the real anti-user signal. Everything else flows from that.
Its not FOSS, and they rely on subscriptions. Call me a hardliner, but that's two non-negotiable things when it comes to nice-to-have software for me personally.
If they created an open source version I could self-host, I would happily adopt it. Frankly it looks beautiful and is only missing easy file integration. But they don't because it would cause them to lose a vast source of value they provide to their customers (providing proxies and servers for people to access their data remotely).
They rely on subscriptions for two very subscriptiony things - storing and syncing files, and hosting a website. Both have ongoing recurring costs, so a subscription is the only thing that makes sense. You don't actually need either of them and could easily use any other third party syncing/static host tool or service, and many people do with Git, Dropbox, etc.
The only part of their business model you can't go around is the fact that they're not FOSS, and for business use you need a business license. I personally find the terms quite acceptable (only apply if you work in a for profit place with more than two employees and more than X revenue), and the price is good value for money for me.
This looks very hackable too (in the good way).