Everyone's anecdotes will be different (and may differ along generational lines.) For a more concrete example of users seeking non-standard software, within a few years of it coming out Chrome became the most popular desktop web browser, surpassing IE. People perferred the experience on Chrome over that on IE to a considerable degree. On the privacy front, 96% of users opt out of surveillance-based advertising [1] when empowered to do so.

The longer we consider concepts like user freedom and privacy as only things that "HN elites" would appreciate, the more tolerable user-hostile design choices will be among HN types.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/05/96-of-us-users-opt-o...