I see your point and don't mean to be argumentative, but a couple small corrections.

First, the pivot to "meta" was just over a year ago, so it hasn't been quite years.

Second, I haven't been shy about sharing my opinion internally, though I haven't been broadcasting it either. The first thing I said in our team group chat when we'd heard this announcement was (context, I am much older than most people on the team) "I'm old enough to have read Snow Crash the week it came out and IT WAS A DYSTOPIA, why are we building it?"

Third, this opinion is indeed extremely common internally.

Fourth, I genuinely have no idea how this decision was made; it was certainly not on the basis of net cost savings. We did the math.