Agreed. And, I can imagine anyone working on anything like WEI will not find a safe work environment so as long as their work environment involves being on the internet in any shape or form. So I guess if you work on the Chrome team and this is assigned to you, I genuinely do feel empathy, although I also think that you should probably quit if you value psychological safety.

This is a complicated issue. I view work as a mutual exchange: I work on software in exchange for money. It is a bonus when I think the software or mission is genuinely cool. That said, I'm not one to be highly moralizing about it. I'd quit if someone asked me to do something illegal, and I will (and have) generally refuse to do work that is just simply morally bankrupt (And I have been tested on this. Early in my career, I refused to remove annual subscription renewal reminders for a subscription service. I didn't suggest that I would quit if it were done, but I voiced my disapproval and made it clear I wouldn't do it. We didn't wind up doing this, thankfully.) But, I will generally work on things that I don't agree with. I'm vocal about it, but work is work.

But y'know, people have livelihoods to maintain. It's easy to say this if you live alone, have plenty in the bank, a great safety net, and a great network. (Not that all of that applies to me, but for sake of argument.) Certainly the job market is also tighter and the future of software engineering as a career is uncertain in some regards. So outright refusing to do work could be a scary prospect. Even being vocal about it and rocking the boat may be scary.

But that said, this being the case does not make the answer any less certain. While harassment and toxicity that crosses certain lines is not something I think people should justify, I certainly understand the why: working on something like WEI triggers an immune response from the proponents of the open web. And while I'm sure many people would prefer to do things "right", I think that there is an overwhelming feeling that the open web is hostage to the big corporate interests, and that the open web proponents are strongly outnumbered and outgunned in the modern world. And Google never played fair anyway, so they probably don't feel especially enticed to either.

So I think it's natural. What's going to happen is that this will probably continue to escalate, and I can't really say I strongly blame anyone. Google is probably happy to push this responsibility onto employees knowing it could be very mentally taxing, employees with increasingly poor career prospects will not want to rock the boat, and disgruntled "internet activists" who feel pushed to their limits are unlikely to care tremendously about the emotional damage they cause (it's not like the Internet is really known for its kindness to begin with.)

I'm thinking it's gonna be a good time to pivot away from computer careers these next few years...