I think you were a bit unfair because this is Miguel de Icaza, Google him up. He has probably invested (both in money directly and/or programming hours) into EVERY ecosystem you can think of in the last 25 years, paid and unpaid ones.
In the linked article he is cheerleading in favour of closed-off platforms, and promotes ceding control of your software to a third party as a good thing.
But even before this Miguel de Icaza had no integrity left to speak of in my opinion. Some random schmoe actually would have been more believable.
Go talk to the consumer. I'd be willing to bet not a lot care about "ceding control of their software." The amount that do, don't matter that much.
Time and time again people on here bloviate about topics such as these, but no action is ever taken. In fact, many on here are just working on more data collecting, more adtech, working at the FAANGs themselves. They tout Data science and ML but somehow want privacy, despite the fact that they rely on the data generated by all of these apps.
This developer utopia doesn't exist and never will. It's best we all be realistic about this reality and understand that just because you can put up with command line doesn't mean Joe from Turtle Creek PA wants to to look at email. And he's willing to give up something for that.
Like Facebook Google and Amazon?
Yes that, for me he always was on the side which had the most money, before it was Microsoft (.NET is the coolest thing ever...that was before Nadella) and after he sold Mono, Apple is the new cool shit...did he already praised Swift for being the coolest thing ever?
Privacy is a tough problem - I know many people - very intelligent people - who have given up and have figured out their compromise.
I use apple devices, and although I see their good points and bad points, I think pro-privacy is apple marketing rhetoric.
(examples: no firewall possible on ios; "content blockers" are opt-out -- with no way to determine the sites being visited; apple creation of iBeacons plus no ability to turn off bluetooth in quick settings; more dark patterns as time goes on)
I don't think being intelligent and standing for your values is related.
They just chose the easy path over the uncomfortable one, the only difference with someone dumb is that they knew what they were doing (and so have no excuse).
I'm not throwing stones at them, I did the same exact choice and I don't feel particularly good about it. I use the 2 most privacy abusive OS there is, Windows and Android and I so distrust them that I can't even have a diary.