For example, Terry Gilliam (the director) "renounced his American citizenship, describing the George W. Bush administration as having created an environment "scarily similar to the Orwellian nightmare" of his 1985 film Brazil."
Apparently they used to be a lot more "automatic" about revoking citizenship for acts (like joining a foreign military as an officer) where there wasn't clear intent to renounce citizenship. It now requires a seriously affirmative act; essentially showing up at a consulate and making a declaration, demonstrating that it's intentional and informed, etc.
I find it interesting that there are clearly so many in this country who have very deep disagreements with the law, but so few seem to leave. Of course I do not blame them; simply moving somewhere more agreeable to you is not as simple as Socrates may have you believe...
Also, many of the problems with the US are actually global externalities and hurt non-citizens/non-residents abroad even more than they affect US citizens or those within the US. We essentially are responsible for the global war on drugs, for instance.
It's hard to figure out what things would cause me to be so angry at the USG to renounce citizenship but not to remain in the US and use all means to try to fix the problem. e.g. if there were a genuine Hitler/Stalin/Mao-level takeover of the US, I wouldn't be content to just flee somewhere and try to avoid it; the only reason to leave would be temporarily to raise funds/forces to try to fix it. But I really don't see anything like that happening in the US -- much more likely just a long slide into comparative irrelevancy like the UK has done over the past 60-80 years.
Yes. Despite the HN headline and the lede paragraph of the linked article ascribing this to US taxes, the article's "poster boy" (I mean, literally, the example of the trend who they lead with a big photograph of, and the only one of the two named examples who is quoted actually discussing his motive in the article) -- Mahmood Karzai, who has lived in Afghanistan for 12 years and is the elder brother of Afghan President Hamid Karzai, cites his reason as "I might become politically active, therefore I decided to give up my [U.S.] passport." Nothing to do with taxes, there.
I only know one person (who wasn't otherwise a criminal) who renounced for what seemed like totally non-financial, non-administrative reasons: Vince Cate, back in the 1990s, when he was my neighbor in Anguilla and wanted to work on crypto stuff during the ITAR ban days.