No. Not buyin' it. It's a ends-justify-means headfake that allows nerds to feel good about the schadenfreude they feel towards the people that pay their salaries for not wanting to know the intricacies of SSH or whatever and FUCK'EM.

There's this vision of slovenly, lazy manufacturers attempting to make a quick buck off of the poor, benighted, uneducated consumer (do you see how even you are dripping with condescension on this one?) without any thought to principles, ethics or good design practices when what actually happens is:

1) Nerds come up with a software package that does all sorts of cool shit

2) Manufacturers integrate that software package

3) Other nerds poke giant fucking holes in that software package causing real economic harm

4) Nerds on both sides come together to blame the manufacturers for using their software and the consumers for not understanding the undeniable superiority of nerds.

I've got 40-odd TB worth of Synology in the closet. It cost me multiple thousands of dollars and it does nothing sexy. It's a backup target for three different Time Machine instances, three Carbon Copy Cloner jobs and two instances of Macrium Reflect. It is literally a dumb linux RAID array, the second I've built, the first using Embedded bullshit and IDE back in 2000 when that shit was bleeding edge.

I built that 40-odd TB using Synology because if you ask the nerds, the nerds will say "if you want to set it and forget it, run Synology." Great. the non-hobbyist route, the "I'm willing to pay to do it right" approach that won out over the "I've got a spare DL380 I can sell you" method, required me to configure an NTP server via SSH in order to get my backups to work. So when you deliberately say "I want to do this right, I want to dot all the I's and cross the T's, you're still writing fucking shell commands.

And then Synolocker hits. And what's the advice of the nerds?

"Unplug it."

Yeah. Top professionals, competent everywhere, and whenever a threat comes out that they don't get to gloat about ahead of time, the response is hair-on-fire SHUT-IT-DOWN panic.

Okay, so you bring it back after three days of zero functionality and how do we nail it down to protect it from a vulnerability that existed when the damn thing was sold to you but nobody knew about it because reasons? Well, first compile this GNU repository...

And really, fuck 'em all. I can't think of a single client-side problem I have observed in the entire IT industry where the first instinct of everyone wasn't to slag on everybody who knew vaguely less than them. And you know what? Twice in my life I've had to load up a hard drive full of MP3s to replace the crashed music collections of friends who make their living supporting users but somehow don't have the common sense to back up terabytes of information. And you give them a stern look and they say "I know, I know, I should have backed up" but these are the same people that will berate someone for using one password across two websites.

There's no "but." Nerds giveth, nerds taketh away, and nerds thrash on everyone else for giving them the means to do so and fuck 'em.