Hand on heart, that reputation is by and large justified. The vast majority of FOSS is crap. Just look at what's on offer in the Jolla store or, worse still, in Openrepos.

A lot of factors. Convenience is the most obvious one. If you wanted to show off your holiday snaps to your aunt say 20 years ago, you had to bring along a photo album when you came for a visit. Now you just send her a link to a a cloud storage of some kind.

Not everyone has the skill or the means to run their own cloud storage, just like not everyone has the skill or means to bake their own bread. So we delegate. There is nothing wrong with that.

But there is a small difference, and therein lies another factor. Delegating your bread making means you go to the shop and buy bread made by someone else. The key word here is "buy". You pay for it. With money. Money is tangible. You generally do not pay for the data storage, at least not in money. The fact that you pay in some other way is often overlooked.