It’s like that with every competitive game.
You see other people playing it and think “wow, that’s cool. I wanna try it”, only to be welcomed by what you just described. Your success then depends on whether you have a hard skin to endure the bullshit, or if you’re social enough to have others play with you that won’t dismiss everything you do so easily. More often than not we don’t have the patience/ability for either.
This is more about Apple’s record on doing things to embellish their latest tech. They’re going to do the whole “this is a feature exclusive to our Pro models” and a year or two later they’re going to “add” it to others and call it an innovation breakthrough.
It’s surprising a tech company like them would bother to do this, given that USB-C is already capable of those speeds, but it’s also unsurprising cause it’s Apple.
If what you’re looking for it’s not a common find or just very rare, you can put it on your wishlist searches and you may eventually get a hit. You don’t need to leave the app open all the time (although that’d be ideal), you can just leave it on your wishlist and it’ll be searched automatically everytime you open it.
On some of the subs that I still frequent, the content has swiftly deteriorated, and it’s not just due to the still on-going protests anymore. I’m subscribed to something like 50 subs or so, and it’s always a handful of these that show up on my subscribed feed. If I want to find the other subs (some of which I don’t fully recall why I subbed to them) I have to browse down past a lot of crap content, or look at my list and click them individually. In short, the experience has been awful, not to mention that I no longer browse it on my phone when bored.
Reddit is still there as a resource, mostly for Google searches that take me there, but otherwise it feels “dead” to me, in ruins. It will not go away, like you said, it’ll definitely stick around but I think people will gradually move away to other platforms and its content will evolve to something that won’t be relevant to us one day.
I’ve seen a few users mentioning their comments have been “undeleted” after a few attempts to remove them, and I’ve also seen comments by [deleted] accounts that still have their comments visible. This was right after the 48hr shutdown period, so it might not be a thing anymore.
I’ve found DDG to be adequate for the majority of things I search, but when I need something specific or with some nuance, it fails miserably. For that reason I still use Google when I do stuff for work, or when I do troubleshooting. For my daily usage DDG is just fine, though.