My company is tiny comparatively (~150ish employees) and even I've heard various PMs unironically say things like "Let's enable it by default for everyone, because we have those KPIs to hit!"
I've fought back against so much BS like this, but it's just endless and I can't win'em all. Who cares about good UX, not nagging our (paying) customers incessantly about stupid features nobody has ever asked for while the core product languishes and 80% of our customer feedback is "Please make the platform more stable"? All that matters is AI, and that EVERYONE is forced into using AI so our CEO can say in a slidedeck that we've gained X% usage of our shiny new AI thing (that everyone subsequently disables as soon as they can).
It's a fucking joke honestly, this whole industry is a complete farce.
I don't know -- I don't think that there's a particular social contract (much less a legal one) between companies and users that the offering they provide today will be unchanged forever.
I don't mean to defend the dark pattern in this particular case, I'm responding to you saying "this whole industry is a complete farce". If a company decides that The Way to use their product needs to be nudged in a different direction, they can. (Almost) nobody complained when macs started shipping with Rosetta [0] installed.
I'm nowhere near as confident that Apple Intelligence is worth betting the goodwill of users on as I was about apple silicon + rosetta for intel binaries, but it's Apple's bet to make.
[0] okay, a stub launcher for intel binaries that made it super quick and easy to get Rosetta installed
I've fought back against so much BS like this, but it's just endless and I can't win'em all. Who cares about good UX, not nagging our (paying) customers incessantly about stupid features nobody has ever asked for while the core product languishes and 80% of our customer feedback is "Please make the platform more stable"? All that matters is AI, and that EVERYONE is forced into using AI so our CEO can say in a slidedeck that we've gained X% usage of our shiny new AI thing (that everyone subsequently disables as soon as they can).
It's a fucking joke honestly, this whole industry is a complete farce.