The current silicon valley meta for a while now seems to be to do any shit to lure in a user base that they ultimately can cash in on a year or two down the line.

Once you piss those users off, they go somewhere else and the cycle continues with another company that pops up to solve the artificially created problems with whatever the old thing was. Rinse and repeat.

Whatever the service or software does is secondary to getting you to stick around until they have enough users to sell or sell to

Isn’t the VC objective in the name? They’re explicitly looking for new companies to make them money.

Did I miss a mini news cycle so suddenly VC is an incredibly common term?

Well without VC cash injection many tech startups would simply die early. No one forces a company to take VC money. All recipients do it willingly to themselves.