By selling advertiser space via their website and newsletter they encourage people to sign up for. You can tell the one in the OP is focused on that in their advertise page https://openalternative.co/advertise and the ad for the owners other platforms which help people monetize list/data table sites like this.

Both are setup to profit from these recommendations, especially the one in the OP. I’m not suggesting these aren’t useful sites, but that there are financial motivations at play as well

Video game crash? What?

The only moral theft is my theft.

I feel your premise remains flawed with these examples. The average consumer is not tinkering in the ways you describe, regardless. The average person isn’t following traces, looking for broken pins, or guessing how devices work.

You may have an intimate understanding of the technologies of your youth/life but that is not a universal truth amongst people of the time you are referencing.

The same people repairing their VHS in the 90s are replacing their android smart phone screens or batteries today. As the other posters have mentioned, tinkerers today are even creating their own competition products or major revisions thanks to cheap compute modules, arduinos, 3d printers, and cheap electronic parts from China.

Check yourself, you are assuming life was better in the past when the reality is that today features far more opportunity at an affordable cost with copious resources/tutorials for any individual to manipulate their technology.

Wordpress makes up like 40% of the Internet depending on the source of the claim. I’m pretty sure it’s used for more than just blogs.

I’m already wasting my time on this site and other “social media”, I don’t need to waste more of it by seeing shitty commenters regularly. You tag them to avoid, I block them to avoid. We are doing very similar actions, but I don’t even see them and waste my time reading the tag that tells me they suck

Idk. You do you but curating my online experience is not a red flag, it’s healthy