Yeah, this certainly isn't on the users. The change is monopolies but perhaps even more, the end to the growth of the Internet. Both of these imply that each company needs to leverage each user it has. And that basically means pushing the users to make choices in every single situation where the user can be pushed.

Here, you have various ideologies of user interface. One is approach that users are idiots/"easily confused" and need to be treated-as-such/"given clear direction. Another seems to this reference to the marginal user - that our product is craptasm of dark pattern 'cause we have to satisfy the least common denominator (it's Google, so maybe we're just on dark gray patterns currently).