This is a weirdly reductive take. Any new technology can be better in some aspects and worse in others. (To use your car/horse analogy: cars are much faster and have increased standards of living, but they have also had large negative effects on society and the environment.)

And it's a poor analogy because driver licensing is almost a straight consequence of how dangerous cars are, but the openness of an SoC does not directly follow from how fast it is.