I've noticed this tendency in myself and thought about the 'why' a lot, and I think it comes down to subconsciously factoring in the cost of lock-in, or worse, lack of access to fix/improve a tool I've come to rely on
Sure, I can pay google or fastmail to host a mailserver for me, but that deprives me of the joy of configuring and updating dovecot/postfix/etc, writing custom backup scripts, writing my own anti-spam tooling, etc. I want to know how all those pieces work.
Sure, I can pay kagi to search its index of webpages for me, but that deprives me of the joy of creating and running a botnet to index webpages, storing 100s of terrabytes of scraped data, and writing my own search code.
Targeting hackers is indeed a sucker's game.
As someone who works in infra and dabbles in coding, this is a continual bugbear, because often I’ll find an optimization while troubleshooting “my” problem, and the dev team is disinterested in implementing it. Their endpoints are meeting their SLO, so who cares?
I'm 90% sure you're serious, but that didn't stop me having the best belly laugh for a solid few minutes at this. Thank you.