That's not what I'm getting at though; I'm not saying everything is awesome, or that public backlash is even the best way to currently enact change -- I just want to push against the occasional criticism I see that complaining about stuff doesn't help, that consumer backlash is ultimately just virtue signalling, that boycotts don't ever work, and that it's all just a waste of time.

To be clear, some types of complaining are harmful, problematic, or worthless: this is complicated, it isn't black-and-white. But it's not universally worthless to publicly push back on company policies. There are a nontrivial number of stories about consumer backlashes actually causing companies to change course. What that suggests is that on more important issues (just for one example, arbitration), we could see real movement if the backlash was large enough and unified enough.

i wasn't happy with the script that they were required to use, but at least it was better than any twitter-based support i've received, well, except alaska airlines which has (had?) amazing twitter support.

Isn't that more or less what you should do as a company? Build things and then adjust your strategy based on how the market likes or dislikes it?

Everyone would have been totally fine with it being behind a toggle, even if on by default.

Broken in the sense that Slack kept going forward even after the complaints kept rolling in. How hard would it have been to pull the latest release?