The point is that a) it’s unfair to expect individual consumers to make a difference and b) it’s not realistic to expect individual consumers to make a difference because network effects are so powerful. The modern world exists in part because of cheap, plentiful oil. If you live most places in the US, you need a car, and probably a gas-powered one at that. Similarly, Facebook gobbles up information about you even if you decide not to use it. You can’t stop using Facebook even if you aren’t using Facebook, because Facebook is actually using you and the billions of other people it siphons data from. This libertarian wet dream of “just don’t use it” doesn’t work on a large scale.
I would generalize it more: people don’t seem to understand the domains they’re getting into. I know devs who are expected to do a lot of Linux work who flounder on the command line. I know devs who write “services”, but don’t know how to administrate the server their service runs on. I know devs doing database work who can’t write JOINs.
I think this is partially because of how democratized the field has become. Any asshole with a computer and some time can write code. I don’t think this is fundamentally a bad thing. But after a certain point, it stops being a hobby for some, and turns into a job. The line is blurry, but at some point you have hobbyists writing software-as-a-service with no knowledge of things like security. I don’t want to gatekeep, but I also don’t want dilettantes getting my identity pwned because they took a JavaScript course and thought that qualifies them to write a SaaS product.
Admittedly, it never hurts to understand the computer at a fundamental level. I think anyone who does automatically has a leg up on anyone who doesn’t. I expect my mechanic to know how engines work, even if they just change my oil. You certainly can change oil without being a mechanic, but you lose out on some depth of knowledge.
So yes, I think there’s rampant dilettantism in the field right now. Short of licensure and/or some laws with teeth, I don’t know how to prevent it. You can nail a lot of legs to a dog and make it an octopus, and there’s still apparently money to be had there, so the octopus keeps moving.