If you are not talking about only tech project creations, then certainly many of the great books might fall under this category, especially those which birthed new mindsets as part of their creation.
To me, they absolutely shunned their core audience -- people who wanted greater flexibility and configurability than existing browsers could give them. As a power user who used to have Firefox humming along exactly how I wanted it (thanks to things like Keyconfig, etc.), I now really perceive next to no difference between Firefox and Chrome. Yes, there's philosophical reasons that make them differ. But in terms of what they offer to the end user? There's no difference. They neutered themselves.
I think it might be of interest here just because it's a fascinating moment in UI suicide. They took a very functional, even ideal UI and cut out huge swaths of functionality purely for the purpose of subsuming it into an existing yet ill-fitting structure.
Gaming it out in my head, I would assume that this increases access to testing for those who are either uninsured or those who could not afford the turnaround time for their insurance to reimburse them for purchase of at-home testing.
As such, in this alternate world without the intervention, a chunk of the populace cannot afford to test. If one wanted to make slightly rasher assumptions, this segment might include those who are in jobs (Walmart, food preparation and service) that expose them to a large part of the population.
Can I ask, purely in the spirit of potential solutions (as opposed to the meta question of whether you should have to do this) -- there's a link there for "Claim this Knowledge Panel". One would presume that it would give you the ability to control what's listed there. Have you tried that?
I'm reminded of a paragraph in the Buzzfeed News investigation that brought this to light, indicating that Mikkelson in early days of Usenet was particularly known for trolling. That response to your inquiry seems particularly trollish.
From Krebs on Security (linked to from Jason Scott's Twitter thread):
> Unable to disengage a lock on his back fence, Herring was instructed to somehow climb over the fence with his hands up.
> “He was starting to get more upset,” Billings recalled. “He said, ‘I’m a 60-year-old fat man and I can’t do that.'”
> Billings said Mr. Herring then offered to crawl under a gap in the fence, but when he did so and stood up, he collapsed of a heart attack. Herring died at a nearby hospital soon after.
If this was treated as a linked-to-Google property, it would have been Google Travel - Weather Trends and would've been canceled along with the rest of Google Travel like 87% of their projects.