So we should respectfully expect better than this. (With the caveat that Canonical is a business. I'm using Ubuntu Pro for free so I won't be berating them, but I think I paying customers perhaps should be.)

I also think that we should consider a sort of an "SLA" concept. If you say "I got you covered" and you drop the ball, I think I do have a grievance in that I could have chosen another option, and now I have to take the time to adjust. On the other hand sometimes people don't actually say "I got you covered" they say "This is a cool thing I'm working on". So something like an "SLA" could clear that up.

I hate to be the guy to complain about a free service (Ubuntu Pro is a source of revenue, but it's free for individuals) but if I knew this was actually was actually being offered I would (hopefully!) have switched off by now.

You started this with "sigh"

And I would put a caveat on code that could somehow be formally verified as correct, using a formal verification system that humans understand. I know people sort of do this with unit tests but I still think that's crazy.

To me it's the memetic dynamic. There's "Old Wisdom". It's entrenched over a few generations now (and maybe some of it comes from before computers). "Old Wisdom" would have never allowed people to seriously start shipping code that they don't even understand. "Old Wisdom" has in fact prepared us for every possible "shiny new thing". That stubbornness was actually a good thing and held things together.

But now "shiny new thing" is so shiny that people convince themselves that it's actually okay. But they have to break the "Old Wisdom" in others. And this stubbornness (again, a good thing) is now rebranded as "being stuck in the old ways". You don't want to be stuck in the old ways, do you? So rather than coming up with real arguments, they're gaslighting people out of their defensive "be prepared for the shiny new thing" posture.

Once a person has been gaslit out of it, it's their turn to gaslight the next people. Pretty soon anyone who is holding back is the weird one. "I guess this is the new thing now?". This rolling effect is what I describe as a mania.

On the flip side, maybe it really is okay and it'll become the "New Wisdom" soon. This is probably also how things change. I still don't care for it because it's very disrespectful to people who have held their ground for good until the point where it's no longer useful. They've believed in something that wasn't actually true, it just temporarily served some greater purpose.

I picked up on a similar dynamic in radical politics when principled adherents are suddenly gaslit as "idealistic" by "practical" people, after they're no longer useful to them (they already won the election, etc).

(made a small edit)