I've been using unity for almost a decade now and enjoying it despite the many caveats and idiosyncrasies I come across.
The bottom line is, I definitely don't want to throw away the decade of experience I have using Unity if I can help it. Ultimately I want them to learn from their mistakes and move forward. While Unity has had a fair share of missteps ultimately it's the devil I know.
I do think this is the right approach. This is the approach I took. I was dependent on an engine for a long time until I realized it was just a facade and that I already possessed the knowledge to do it myself. So when XNA died, and MonoGame wasn’t mature yet, I had no choice but to write my own. Some of that effort went into MonoGame’s early days, most of it didn’t (I respect keeping the API the same but we, devs, could have done better to improve it).
Unity made it easy to build games without having to know the underlying proponents that do what they do. Instead, it’s presented through a massively opaque interface called a MonoBehavior. Because of this opaque abstraction, it’s almost impossible for a Unity game developer to know exactly what’s going on under the hood.
My first game engine took me 3 years to get to a point where I could ship something. My second was 1 year. My latest was 3 months.
Eventually, it becomes just adding another interface to your GPU abstraction to support wgpu or DX14, or Vulkan2, or Metal, any graphics api becomes just a Buffer, a Queue, and a sync lock.
One thing I agree on: more often than not, behind an interesting piece of art lies an interesting personality.
To advance the conversation based on some substantive facts, based on my conversations with creators of large free to play Unity games, all were already using IronSource and were not impacted by the changes anyway. As a game developer who publishes himself, I do not plan to migrate away from Unity, and I wasn't really impacted either. I can't speak for the 30 or so studios who posted pleas to revert the changes, but based on what happened, I believe they got what they wanted. So if their decision-making is rational / based on facts, I don't think they're migrating either.
This is all to say that when you have no budget, so you value your time at zero and you have no visual art you didn't author yourself, it's easy to put 100% of the personality into the product, and make that The Thing. There are people I know who turned 20,000 followers on a TikTok about games into a $1m check for a game studio! This is a viable strategy, it is uniquely suited to people to have opinions about game engines. But my facts-informed opinion is that this isn't representative of most game developers, and that they are actually really happy with Unity and relieved that the pricing changes found a middle ground that is less emotionally charged.