How many people stopped using Windows because you could freely install software from anywhere?
How much has Microsoft paid out in class action settlements for not vetting apps?

Blamed? As in being held accountable?
Users don't get any compensation when their hardware and software do bad things to them.
You're using a lame excuse that not even Google came up with. They just want control, pure and simple--same as Apple.
Microsoft's operating systems never had any restriction on what software you could run, or where you could get it. Did Microsoft get any kind of trouble or "blame" when users ran malware?

I think you missed something here. They had only one copy of the data. Paying someone to take care of it isn't the same as keeping a backup copy.

I learned about backups in 1986, when the floppy disc with my word processor documents got corrupted.
It's just weird that some grownups still don't know you have to keep backups of your data.

I stll occasionally run QuickBASIC 3.00 in DOSBox, mostly to look back at the programs I wrote in school.
It was so much faster than any other BASIC at the time; it's still pretty impressive.

This software wasn't wrtten; it was trained. It's a black box--no one can possibly know how it works. Of course it is capable of behaving in unexpected ways.

It's always better for the team and users to be aware of vulnerabilities than to be unaware.

It's easy to find extremists of every sort saying mad things.
This nonsense has no effect on Wikipedia's reliable sourcing requirements.

Congratulations! Now do the CDDL.

If you're not a regular Wikipedian and you're not familiar with Larry Sanger, I encourage you to read up.
His history speaks for itself.

The solution is not censorship.
Free speech is too important to do this. The correct response to bad speech is good speech.
The power of the state to silence its critics--even in part--is just too great a temptation.

It's closed source spyware. Why is anyone still using it?

The only time I ever installed Chrome was that brief period when it was the only way to stream Netflix on Linux.

I virtually never get spam calls (maybe 2 in the last decade), but it sure is annoying when I'm trying to call someone with the same policy you have.
If I need to call them from work, I don't have any way to send them a text.
If I'm trying to call someone personally, it's obviously because I need an answer now, not when they get around to looking at their texts.

Isaac Asimov explained it this way:

I've been daily driving FreeBSD on my laptop since 2019. I'm posting from it right now. They've really improved wifi support in the last couple of releases.
I haven't needed much proprietary software support in a long time. I do run Google Earth, using the Linuxulator.