I am kind of too scared to ask here, but what did it actually achieve?

I wanted to ask for long time this question, Why does this keeps happening? Apple, Kagi, Vivaldi, news companies and even Google. I started seeing a good amount of people who stopped caring about consumer rights/freedom and started to think and advocate for companies. Even in non-brands cases, a lot of people buy the product with the highest price, because they think that it has a higher quality despite the fact that there is no necessary correlation between both. How do I know that? I know a shop that buy cheap products and sell them with very expensive price tag, to my surprise they are making insane profits. What is happening?

I am looking for a website that report on tech using semi-[Citzen Journalism](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizen_journalism).