"Quite literally an affront to freedom"? Really? Say more.
Threatening people if they don’t take a job with you is in the most literal way a challenge to your autonomy as a human being.
Anyways, if you thought there was any freedom or purity to the tech job market, bad news for you.
Ahh, "everyone else does it" - no, have never been threatened that if I refuse a job offer, or otherwise decline, that my current employer will be told all about how disloyal I was to them.