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The entire goal is to use money to change your behavior. They’re inherently manipulative by definition. It’s literally weaponized mass manipulation. There’s no way to spin that as a positive effect.
If you think about it in terms of it’s effects, advertising is the closest thing we have to mind control: companies are paying money to change the behavior of millions of people. Even without any concrete examples, you can easily see how dystopic it really is when you just think about the intention alone
You’re talking about Thunderbird, a project they basically abandoned to the community. Thunderbird survives in spite of Mozilla, not because of it. Meanwhile their main product Firefox is still bleeding users down into the single digit percentages while receiving half a billion a year from Google. It takes a lot of skill to run such a company so deep into the ground.
Pull up resistors have solved the same problem much more simply for decades. Even with ICs, manufacturers can still make weak cables that lie about their capacity then burst into flames. The IC is not what making the cable safe, it’s the manufacturer. And if all else fails, the host can still directly measure cable resistance with some help from the client.