Google did though, and pulled the described bait-and-switch when depreciating Google Talk in favor of Hangouts (remember those?).
I feel like this really backfired for Google though! Hangouts does not have a large user base, at least relative to Google's scale.
I feel like every description of Google's chat application strategy ends with the punchline, "The Aristocrats!"
Yeah, it did. They handled it really bad. From my experience, back in the Google Talk days I could easily reach my family, friends and people at work via XMPP just because Gmail integration was excellent - no indoctrination required, they were already there checking their e-mails. Once Google forced the switch to Hangouts, it sadly became easier to reach them via Facebook. Nobody really cared to use Hangouts anymore, especially when people started to switch from PCs to smartphones where Hangouts weren't integrated into Gmail at all, and XMPP defederation meant that I didn't have any reason to stay there either.
This seems a very unlikely thing. The relatively few people on Earth who might say that seem unlikely to say it.
You may not plan to leave Mastodon, but there's lots of people "just waiting on that Bluesky invite" or "I'd prefer to use Facebook if they supported ActivityPub" and there is a real fear that "everyone" will choose sides again and the sides won't really include Mastodon because Mastodon doesn't have a marketing budget and Mastodon isn't "cool" and Mastodon is "too nerdy".
We can't say for sure that it would happen again that way, but it is dark reminder that it happened once in a big way and that some of the same culprits were there when it happened.