Pretending like they have something for the future, which they don't.
I've been following some of their research with their VR/AR hardware, and it appears to me they definitely have something for the future. They're investing massive amounts of money, and they seem to be miles ahead of everyone else (well, it doesn't seem like there is anyone else). To me, they clearly do have something for the future, with what seems like a very natural progression of technology and interacting with computers, with something like the Metaverse being an eventual end goal, maxing out that technology.
Maybe Metaverse isn't what people want, but there's so much between the computers we use now and the Metaverse that they can dip their toes in, along the way.
I'll say it with naive confidence: AR/VR is the future of display technology/use.
I think the big thing VR has going against it is just how antisocial it is. It's hard to have shared experiences around the technology unless enough people are already bought in.
The amount of times I've heard "I can't imagine the eyestrain from having a street that close to your face" convinced me that many people are very confused about all of this.
Who are they ahead of? They have a standalone headset which has fairly limited performance, and FB Horizons which looks like something you could make in Unity in a few days. With things like VRChat, Neos, Cluster, and others available, they definitely aren't ahead and are lagging very far behind in my opinion. Their increasingly poor reputation will even limit what they can do in a VR/AR space.
I think judging their long term plan by looking at the limitations with the current hardware (and therefore software), is extremely (and literally) short sighted. Horizons has been "out" for three whole months, and needs to run on that limited hardware. I'm assuming there's real value /learnings for getting the architecture figured out, regardless of the clients GFLOPS.
For some positives, besides having the only viable standalone headset right now, their camera based tracking (position, hands, controller) is far better than anyone else's. There's nothing remotely comparable for their hand tracking. I think it would be hard to argue that camera/lidar based inside out tracking is not necessarily the future for small form factor devices.