Since the issue is so obvious as not to require any competence in "vendor selection" to notice, you need a better explanation

No. I don't "need" anything. I am not feeding trolls, but simply offering the benefit of my experience. If you want a better explanation, you may ask nicely.

But there is no "benefit" when the resulting explanation doesn't explain anything, and since you don't need a better one it would be pointless to expect one, so why even ask?

Maybe what's needed - broadly - is some sort of "choosing good software vendors" education, for people in non-IT fields. Medical care would certainly benefit from similar education.

In the 90s my parents were briefly involved in designing that sort of curriculum in a for profit space (for kids) [1] and they encountered all sorts of problems in that 1) software vendor advice changed roughly every six months (often for no particular reason than a brand got bored and changed names/rearranged cheese or went out of business or got bought by some other conglomerate got worse and a new alternative needed, 2) nobody really wanted to pay for the education of which software to buy/use, and most crucially, 3) nobody thought they needed that education.

Parents assumed kids should naturally get it from the school systems. School systems don't have the resources to teach it in most places (and where they did it has always been underfunded/under-appreciated). Parents themselves assumed they were smart enough to figure the stuff out, when they had a chance to get around it it, probably.

It sort of feels like software education has been left in a permanent "Somebody Else's Problem" field. Both in learning it personally and in finding someone to teach it.

[1] It was a franchise called Futurekids.