Fair enough, and I think I'm mostly in agreement with you.

I think people almost always mean well - and of course those public instances were needed to get things off the ground but I'm going to say that I'd rather see that they eventually die off as smaller servers become easier to run and people actually have personal connections with whoever runs the server they are using (ideally themselves)

I've seen it speculated (or opined) that this tends to be where things are headed, based on the state of coming tech, ease of use, and current models. Something like that, anyway.