It means your in a large room with a lot of people talking to each other. It's not a fine dining experience where people whisper. It's a social place. The social aspect was taken out of the experience, which is vital to development. The "loud" (meaning, it's not quiet) aspect is not a negative. It's not a "lunch break" for adults to go decompress from the stress at work. If kids want quiet for studying, they can hit their school library, or other places for solitude and tranquility. It's about younger people actually communicating and discussing what is going on in the day, their life, after school, hobbies, interests, relationships, etc.. Imagine going to a playground where there are 100 children. None of them are making a sound. That would be a scary sign. You should hear kids laughing, screaming, crying... experiencing social engagement. People are being isolated from each other because they are becoming "addicted" to screens and short media formats. We are training our brains for instant gratification, but there is no retention or learning going on. Younger people aren't learning how to communicate directly with others. Without these engagements we hobble our development of things like empathy. How to control our emotions with others. It's damaging for all.
The way the current system is set up we rely on work to make money. If jobs get automated away, how will we make money then? We aren't ready for a post-work world.
No one individual can bear the burden of trying to address all social issues. I think it's good to live according to one's political and moral beliefs, but ultimately there is a point to where this is reasonable to expect of someone.
That is to say that I think one can criticize the tech industry and its e-waste production, while also using a modern smartphone, for example.
You have to go through a first run wizard to set up your Microsoft account, etc. even on a computer with Windows preinstalled. At least that was my experience a few years ago, and I doubt it has changed.
The controversy started with questionable sponsorship decisions for NixCon, which brought the entire project leadership under scrutiny as it wasn't the first time this had happened.
This, along with some more long-term issues contributed to the creation of an open letter[^1] criticizing the BDFL of Nix. How valid you consider the criticisms is not for me to decide, but I don't think dismissively reducing the issue to a "woke takeover" is helpful.
I'd recommend taking a look at Guix as a kind of alternative implementation of the idea of Nix. It has its own usability issues, especially surrounding nonfree software and a much smaller community, but it addresses some of the issues you comment on.
I would like to see latency tests, measuring the impact of compositing in X and Wayland, as well as uncomposited X vs tearing-enabled Wayland, etc. Unfortunately I don't think this has been thoroughly benchmarked yet.
