Given the “anyone can join in” nature of the fediverse, something like this was inevitable. I expected it to be at least be another couple of years, though.
There is potential good for this- a lot more developer resources going into this technology. And being open source software, there’s a lot of ways we can potentially mitigate any damage if we have to. But… there’s definitely a lot of ways this can go poorly as well.
For my vim journey it was the draw of being able to quickly navigate and manipulate text without ever needing my hands to move away from the home row on the keyboard, and being willing to put in the time and effort to push past the learning curve.