Not surprising. Crazy how zoom in the beginning of the crisis was hailed for helping folks get together, but now with all the highlighted security concerns they are receiving a ton backlash. Hopefully they can recover and learn from this.
Shame on us.
Without NAT from home gateways (like consumer routers) preventing inbound connections from the internet, security would be far more of a nightmare than it is today. Requiring that people manually forward specific ports is the best way to handle it. We would be seeing news about Blaster-like worms pretty much every week of the past 20 years, otherwise.
Also, even if it were a good idea, this still wouldn't solve the problem at all. The NAT-traversing capability of Zoom and other products is like 0.01% of the value they provide. You still need good software.
Zoom "just works". My in-laws joined a Zoom conference without help. There is no way they would have figured out Hangouts or Teams.
This would be a great time for some proper European alternatives.
The worst case of this was when a manager came and told me we had just landed a big customer and my response was, 'Oh, fuck me'.
When your product isn't built for scale, you can sell the hell out of it to small and medium sized customers, or sit back and let organic growth bring you people by word of mouth, and they will all be happy. Invite yourself to the Big Show before your systems are ready and you're gonna have a bad time.
In this case, there is probably nothing Zoom could have done to avoid this level of scrutiny at this time. Handle that scrutiny better? Sure. But it was going to happen either way.