IIRC the free tax filing thing being killed is just classic lobbying, the owners of Intuit and other paid tax filing companies have myriad political connections and spend a lot of money to protect their interests.
It's the same conversation every year, well before Elon came along. The big players are TurboTax and H&R Block. TurboTax specifically has led the charge for over two decades to prevent you from ever filing your taxes for free. It's a racket, and an extremely profitable one for them, so there's no way they're going to willingly give that up without some new and enforceable laws being passed.
They _definitely_ employ a lot of dark patterns, though. Glad you brought that up, because not enough people are taking the "dark patterns" thing seriously enough, in my opinion. It is absolutely wild what you can get people to do without even realizing it with some good front-end development, and none of us are immune to those tricks.
[1] https://www.livenowfox.com/news/irs-direct-file-doge-cuts
[2] https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/05/business/musk-irs-direct-file