I thought NATS was a project under the CNCF, with the trademarks being transferred to the Linux Foundation, which is why they couldn't relicense NATS, and why they can't relicense it in the future.
Largely in part due to regulatory capture; it is not necessarily innate of a government to cause this. Maybe restrictions on how corporations are able to influence governments to act against their constituency might solve this problem, rather than giving corporations carte blanche to do anything...
Very rarely do you need to pass around a lifetime-bound struct or enum that isn't _also_ meant to be temporary. (One database pool has database connections lifetime bound, for example, but the pool still owns the connection.) When I do, I generally eat the cost and put it behind a Rc/Arc, where cloning is cheap.
It is 'borrowing' because you don't own it, not because you don't want to clone/copy it. Sometimes it is cheaper to borrow than it is to clone/copy; sometimes it is not.
The reason it works is because they've done the research to make it work. It isn't a coincidence DAUs increase. I think it is important to recognize that it can impact you, and take steps to account for that, even if - or especially if - you don't want it to. You are not immune to propaganda, and all that.