Maybe you are right that I give too much benefit of the doubt. I have been following the saga and I believe the AI turn was a bad move on every level. That's why I stopped using the app. But I can still believe that the CEO doesn't want to ship the cluttered garbage that is the present app. I think the pop-ups are a net-negative even purely financially with churn outweighing subscriptions. So my model for the situation is that he spent his credibility on AI, which was bad, and now doesn't have the credibility to spend to change the metrics that guide every team's behavior, so the company decays entropically. Maybe the clutter comes from the CEO trying to up subscriptions, but based on the first 10 years of the app, I believe he has better taste than to do that, so I look for a more complex explanation. Again, may be giving too much benefit of the doubt.

[edit: thinking about it more, I think I have built up a lot of goodwill with the app over the years, and it's a strange mental process for years of goodwill to evaporate over the course of a few weeks]