Yes definitely. There are a lot of nuances in privacy. As an example, take the approach to ML and assistants, where Google collects most of everything to train models on their servers, while Apple tries to anonymize things a bit (e.g. their “differential privacy” techniques).

Yes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window

Well, yes, of course it does.

I'm willing to limit what apps I use and carefully consider what I install. I'm not yet willing to abandon my smartphone.

Choosing the lesser of N evils is a pretty common and often rational choice, in life and in engineering. May be not in this case, and it's good to be unsatisfied, but disregarding the debate just because neither option is great makes no sense.

Naively, because it only takes two suppliers in a market, for consumers to start playing them against each-other by switching to whichever one plays more to consumer preferences at any given moment, incentivizing the suppliers to compete to satisfy that consumer preference. Like a classical "race to the bottom" that lowers prices, but with some other factor that consumers care about instead of cost.

(Of course, this assumes people bother to switch. In reality, this isn't even true in oligopolist party politics, let alone in oligopolist markets. In practice, there need to be a lot more, smaller options before switching costs are forced down enough to encourage people to switch. In phone markets, this looks like how people switch somewhat easily between different Android device manufacturers for their next phone. If we could get phone Operating Systems working like that, we'd really have something!)