I’ll trust my MBA and decades of industry experience over an unreasoned gut feeling of everything should be free and developers shouldn’t get paid. And please cite the data indicating the number of users who host Plex servers that are not looking for alternatives is pretty damn low. A few folks in a fediverse echo chamber does not a user base make.
I think the most salient point here is it is indeed increasingly uncomfortable to put content in a plex server due to the increasing likelihood this telemetry makes it to MPAA/RIAA types and that will definitely be a self inflicted wound from a double barreled shit shotgun for Plex.
When I was in college I had a prof who tried to fail me because I used the new InDesign and not Quark for the final project in Desktop Publishing class.