I agree with everything you're saying (intentionally frustrating users is bad), but I don't agree that a simple, straightforward form that can be filled out in under 10 seconds is an attempt to frustrate anyone. I don't think it's reasonable to suggest that a significant number of people, upon seeing this form, decided not to cancel because filling it out was too much a waste of time. It's just not a plausible argument.
Another commenter mentioned going through hell attempting to cancel a gym membership. I've had the same thing happen to me: took multiple phone calls over the span of a few hours to cancel my Bally's membership. That was a deliberate attempt to frustrate. This form is several orders of magnitude better.
This isn't really something that is subject to argument; it's an empirical question. It's measurable; a known quantity to people who have implemented it in an A/B fashion.
I'd be very surprised if additional friction to a cancel process had zero impact. That would be sufficiently surprising to be worthy of an article or paper.
I'd have no problem with the form if you could just skip it and click Cancel at the bottom. But the moment you force users to fill out anything is the moment you turn evil.
I agree that it's not anywhere near the same magnitude as it could be. But that doesn't make it OK.
See also the evil AOL dialer dialogue that used weird negatives to confuse people into not disconnecting. That was so evil I think they last some law cases over it.
It's disappointing that so much effort goes into evil tweaks. But it's worse that customers reward that evil behaviour. Candy Crush is huge at the moment. I'd pay £5 for something like Candy Crush without the evil; heck, I'd buy it for all my family too to avoid the constant FB spam from it.
Note that I have nothing against game creators charging for their products, it's just that the freemium model is pretty much inherently built such that creators make their money by making the game less fun to play.
I'd have no problems with a page that says, "We're sorry to see you go, won't you reconsider? Here are some reasons why we think you should stay." I have a big problem with a page that says, "We're sorry to see you go, so we're going to make your life a little bit harder in the hopes that you change your mind."
Whenever two entities transact, there are four basic outcomes. The best outcome is when both parties benefit. That's what we should aim for in general. Another good outcome is when one party willingly takes a hit to benefit the other party, which we could call charity. Then there are evil outcomes where one party harms another party for their own benefit, and finally stupid outcomes where both parties come out worse off.
Trying to convince me not to cancel by wasting my time is clearly in the "evil" category. There's no attempt at mutual benefit, they're just trying to increase my cost in order to increase their benefit. An honest company tries to increase my benefit to also increase their benefit.