> customers who have used fewer resources have covered the costs, in a way, for other customers who have used much more resources
Literally the business model of every "shared resource service model" on the planet. Hetzner's entire business model is built on this... them acting like they're shocked to discover this is... disingenuous at best.
> Arch does this, Gentoo does this, NixOS does this, why does Debian has to be different?
I say this as someone who ran Gentoo for years and daily drives Arch today.
Because sometimes you don't want entire swaths of your server being rebuilt/tinkered with on a regular basis under the hood. "Move fast, break everything" is great in dev/test land, or a prod environment where the entire fleet is just containers treated like cattle, but contrary to what the SREs of the valley would believe, there's a whole ecosystem of 'stuff' out there that will never be containerized, where servers are still treated like pets, or rather, at least "cherished mules", that just do their job 24/7 and get the occasional required security updates/patches and then go right back to operating the same way they did last year.
That's the rhetoric of both sides though, isn't it?
the only difference is in who the far left vs far right each believe "should be stopped".