Calling them psychologists is giving them too much credit, but you're right that the companies trying to trick them are putting tons of resources into it.
Here's my hot take as a dev who's been making websites since before JavaScript and css were invented: modern web development is leaps and bounds better than how it was and the rapidly changing best practices had a big part for how we got there in the time we did. I think the industry is in a great place now and now that it is things have slowed down and the focus is now on stability rather than changing development patterns.
They're all con artists. The people buying them were trying to scam someone else.
This is the feudal stage of capitalism where the rich recaptured all the real estate and are making tons of profit just sitting on it.
Call me crazy but I like to give people the benefit of the doubt before assuming the worst when I don't know their situation.
MS is basically getting a ton of equity in exchange for cloud credits. That's a ridiculously good deal for MS.
We can totally explain how the universe works. It's random! But it's also not random! We can explain why, but you won't understand it. Not magic!
Why should anyone care? I don't go around telling people every time I use stack overflow. Gotta keep in mind gpt makes shit up half the time so I of course test and cross reference everything but it's great for narrowing your search space.
They did that back in the day too.
Open source software is safe because so few people use it it's not worth a hacker's time to break into it (joking, but of course that doesn't apply to server software)
I think the straw thing is much more about trash than it is about combating climate change. Plastic getting into the eco system and building up in landfills is a big problem too, but it's a different and also important problem.
It will be questioned, but you have a good explanation. The tricky part is explaining it elegantly. Hiring managers kinda glance at resumes so you should add a sentence at the end explaining that you were let off due to internal company reasons. You should also try and get a letter from the company explaining that it wasn't for performance reasons. Even better would be to get letters of recommendation from your coworkers and manager. Hopefully they'll be extra nice to you due to your situation, but you need to be proactive about it.