You're not wrong. Reddit & Elon started it and everyone laughed at them and made a stink. But my guess is the "last dying gasp of the freeloader" /s wasn't enough to dissuade other companies from jumping on the bandwagon, cause fiduciary responsibility to shareholders reigns supreme at the end of the day.
This move feels poorly timed. Their latest ad campaigns about not having ads, and the goodwill they'd earned lately in my book was just decimated by this. I'm sure I'm not the only one who's still just dipping their toes into the AI pool. And am very much a user that under utilizes what I pay for because of that. I have several clients who are scrambling to get on board with cowork. Eliminating API usage for subscription members right before a potentially large wave of turnover not only chills that motivation it signals a lack of faith in their marketing, which from my POV, put out the only AI super bowl campaign to escape virtually unscathed.
I'm sure there's a million reasons not to, but they could even just open-source Windows 10. Leave you alone with the hardware that you rightfully purchased, and let the community police the security gaps that arise. It's beyond me how planned obsolescence especially on perfectly sufficient hardware is even legal.
Am I missing something? This isn't what ssh's purpose is. Why should anyone care? We're talking about a game built to run over an encryption protocol? What are we even doing anymore? Also, correct me if I'm wrong, but client-side option existing is secure design, really feels like it shouldn't be circumvented server-side without giving the client the choice to do so or not by default. Don't lobby for watering down security for convenience, especially for trivially important objectives, please?