It's the profit imperative biting them in the ass, you can't have exponential growth in a finite system so expect these megacorps to get more and more desperate (and draconian) as the bottom of the barrel draws ever nearer.
Qualanqui
Give Vivaldi a try, it's a chromium fork but with a strong focus on privacy.
No love for Iain M Banks? The Culture series looks like it will tick all your boxes and instead of following a single protagonist the Culture itself is the protagonist so each book has it's own cast of interesting characters.
I've tried everything to try get rid of google's voice assistant on my phone, stripped it right back and disabled it and then went into the settings in google and my phone but still every time I turn on my wireless headphones it always pops up. It's doing my head in, why can't I stop it!
Comrade Gang has merely come down with a case of outspokenness which unfortunately lead to a terminal case of lead poisoning.
I agree with you, I'd love to live in the world where Vivaldi chose Gecko instead of Chromium, but we've only got the cards we've been dealt so at least the Vivaldi team are always very vocal about this and have always said they're going to work around Google's more draconian decisions.
Just goes to show, google is an ad company first and foremost and they're in the process of cutting out any competition to their dominance.
Props too to Vivaldi for blowing the whistle as they have access to all the upcoming chromium builds being a fork.
I personally think corporations are going to kill each other off (most likely culminating in a global corpo-war where the last two duke it out) with only one surviving and becoming something akin to the catholic church in the medieval period, plunging the world into a new dark age.