This.
Media has always had an agenda, which even if meant in good faith is manipulativ.
Just speaking about newspapers:
- the topics are mostly chosen for the audience who can afford newspapers (= good/settled middle class)
- the journalists usually have a social background which allows for having unpaid internships and can afford to study journalism at university (e.g. rules out working class people)
- advertisement is a big (paid newspapers) or the only income source ('free online news')
- this implies to not fuck around with the companies/people paying the advertisement
- this implies also, to not fuck around with the world view of what your readers seem acceptable too much (less readers = less money for advertisement)
- newspapers are owned by rich people which also impacts what topics are covered or not
- newspapers have competition in search engines/internet etc. which they will fight / badmouth
- in Germany at least newspapers/their companies tried to fight adblockers and the peoples freedom to use adblockers in court - w/o making much noise about it. So, information damaging the newspapers reputation are willfully held back.
- every topic I have a little bit of knowledge about which is covered by so called specialists in newspapers is full of shit/wrong assumptions/lacks any kind of deeper understanding
Long story short: Everyone/everywhere has grown up consuming deeply manipulative content from media. Given the bullshit and propaganda we are getting each day by people with an agenda/on someones payroll, crazy hallucinations / generated content won't make things worse than they are already.
I am an IT guy, so my needs, preferences and priorities are not the norm.
IMHO software is mostly a shit-show, doesn't matter if property or FOSS. My most loved target of critique is macOS/Apple, because the user experience is so bad for me. (Forced by my work to use it, so I have several years of experience/suffering with it.)
I think it is more about finding software which works by accident (or your training/prior knowledge), as you expect it should work. The biggest problem with proprietary software is that they usually need to up sell, dump down features (hello, macOS window management, finder and everything else) or want to force you into their walled garden.
One easy example where FOSS kicks ass compared to proprietary is managing/installing and updating software: Linux and the BSDs have all sane centrally managed systems for native packages and Flatpaks/Snaps, compare that to the shit-show on Windows and macOS devices. Don't let me start on provisioning and other topics, where FOSS is by now decades ahead of the stuff one sees in macOS/windows.
One proprietary system which works awesome is Steam and SteamDeck. No questions there and I'll happily throw my money at Valve.
I had the pleasure of working with great UX designers, but you are sorry out of luck if you are not the persona they target and their decisions are guided by making money and making their manager happy, so a good user experience is at most their 3rd concern, if you are lucky.
Concerning documentation I fully agree with you, with very few exceptions (Arch WIKI, FreeBSD handbook, RHELs documentation), the FOSS world is a sad place.
In the end, there is the potential for great UX in both proprietary and FOSS systems, but when you want to focus on user centric, FOSS wins IMHO for IT guys because they are the only systems which are literally build by their users.