How did we go in 20 years from holding these companies to account when they'd misbehave to acting as if they are poor damsels in distress whenever someone points out a flaw?
Honestly I think the problem is more a rosy view of the past versus any actual change in behavior. There have always been defenders of such companies.
They hired a ton of people on very very good salaries
You better thank god for MS for being lazy and incompetent, the last thing we want for big tech is being innovative and have a stronger monopoly
The opposite, to be lazy and to continue giving them money whilst being unhappy with what you get in return, would actually be more like defending the companies.
The opposite we see here: to not criticize them; to blame Microsoft's failure on the critics; and even to discourage any such criticism, are actually more like defending large companies.
This especially includes governments and other institutional buyers.
Their size or past misbehaviors shouldn't be relevant to this discussion. Bringing those up feels a bit like an ad hominem. Whether criticism is valid should depend entirely on how GitHub Actions actually works and how it compares to similar services.
If the past misbehaviours are exactly the same shape, there's not all that much point re-hashing the same discussion with the nouns renamed.