Some of us started coding and archiving data 40+ years ago, many of us were suspicious of cloud storage from the get go and have never relied on it as primary storage and still keep multiple location physical backups regional and under direct control of stakeholders.

AJAX was 1999. Ruby on rails was 2004. The hazards of having your application experience and data subject to the whims of whomever controlled the server were glaringly apparent when your friend showed you a site they built and then tinkered with the data behind the scenes. It was straightforward to extrapolate that dynamic to businesses that had little plan besides grow their number of users at all costs, at least for those not in denial about the incentives of market actors.

Wow. Thanks for that "expert" correction!

I was there, too. These dynamics were eminently foreseeable.

I do agree that the smug take here is overall unhelpful for someone who was young at the time, and is now even using a self-hosted solution. It's also fine to say that you personally weren't concerned, were distracted by the gobs of money programmers were getting paid to build centralized services, thought that the developers with ethics would hold more long term sway over companies, and so on. But don't act like it was unknowable.