Kind of inevitable when you realize how much people are naturally willing to give up computational sovereignty for the sake of convenience and psychological safety with claimed values being the opposite, and it's still the case despite everything that's happened so far

I don't think there is a lot of conscious choice here: If at some point, anything more complex than a phone would be phased out or become unaffordable for consumers, that's not because consumers had somehow collectively voted they only want phones from now on.

Well sure someone could argue that the market isn't an actually reasonable set of choices that people can vote on, but how can it not be considered at least some form of voting? There's been at least 30-40 years in which consumers could try to find out. Unfortunately there's only a finite amount of resources in the market and consumers have to compromise on what takes priority in the tech industry, like getting work done or tackling issues that are visible only in front of them. When people collectively vote for politicians they also have to compromise.

I don't feel extremely on either end, but I would prefer if consumers could own their choices and not try to pretend otherwise.

Well, ok, what would you do in the current situation to "vote" for affordable RAM?

In a perfectly free and fair market and in a world where companies would plan their product strategy exclusively based on current consumer data, this would be true. But neither holds in the real world: The current AI gold rush is now something that is largely decided between investors, boardrooms and hardware vendors with little input from small everyday consumers. And I wager this had been the case for many "tech trends" before that seem more forced on users than being a reaction on them - such as forced updates, mandatory accounts, subscriptions, in-app purchases etc.

Even if it were possible to vote in the market (I deeply disagree though), the ultra rich have waaaaaaay more "votes" in the market to a point where anyone's vote doesn't matter.

Its interesting that you put it as "don't get to", I am pretty sure "normal people" don't care about having local computational power. We in this forum are not normal people, 80% of people just care about the end value computation brings. The future is likely devices with network chips attached to screens ans that's probably a better outcome for 80% of the world. There is no reason to think we pay the same amount of money to get worse results in the future, we can work towards one where we pay less because centralized computation and devices that are only screens and WiFi chips will be cheaper for everyone