> the UK is hardly unique in that votes on constitutional changes are reserved for citizens (+ a few extras due to the country's complicated history)
I agree with you, letting the people most affected have a say wouldn't have been accepted, and that's usually how these things go. I argue that it's still unethical and fails the basic principle of democracy, though. I personally do not respect the result as honouring the civic principles underlying democracy, but I respect that most people take a cruder "my team won" view, and if the 51% foxes vote to eat the 49% hens for dinner, that's democracy to them.
> I think without exception: every right has been grandfathered in for those that were living in the UK at the time, for all intents and purposes
We were talking about the vote being denied to UK citizens abroad too - UK citizens affected by Brexit who had no say. They don't have anything like the rights they used to have.
I've found it interesting for years that when rights are mentioned, most people focus entirely on non-UK citizens in the UK, not the lost rights of UK citizens. But a huge section of the UK population used to travel freely and work, and are deeply unhappy at losing their personal EU rights and seeing access to jobs they used to do closed, and (in my experience) even more distressed that their children won't grow up able to exercise those freedoms to travel, study and work abroad in the way that they themselves were. I guess people who didn't exercise those rights tend not to think about them, and people who did are on the losing side of the result.