I know I started being active here because of Sync, so I'd assume plenty others did too. Honestly I wish there was a Sync-like frontend for most apps, it's just the perfect experience in my book.

I guess the point is you're middle aged in regards to your contribution to society. First 15-20 years of your life you pretty much just "take", while the following 50ish you are expected to chip in. In those terms, 50 sounds about right as being referred to as "middle aged".

Why is everyone so upset?

You know why, it's because in the eyes of Lemmy users who have been here all along, launch of Sync is the start of their eternal September. I moved to reddit back in 2010 as a Digg refugee after the infamous redesign, I saw much of the same back then (down to the plethora of programming and Linux memes).

It's still a drop in the ocean for reddit and the people who left (or just spend less time on it) were never the target audience of this "new course". Reddit will be just fine.

Me in 2012 after spending weeks downloading missing library after missing library to compile Gnome Shell on some irrationally obscure distro.

You hit the nail on the head. Revanced for Sync means I can browse reddit exactly as I did, and I lost interest in Lemmy pretty quickly after installing it. Lemmy is nice but feels too much like the reddit of old which was all tech/nerdy stuff and atheism apologists. It's nice but it just lacks the diversity that, over time, made reddit unique.

I spent a couple weeks in Poland exactly in August 2013 and I distinctly remember a huge Firefox OS billboard on the Warsaw Central train station building.

a 20 year debt to society

It could actually be way more than that when you consider retirement (in much of the western world at least). You also can't really "have agency over yourself" in the sense you mean without making use of what society puts at everyone else's disposal (roads/internet/currency/etc), and freeloading comes with all sorts of drawbacks because society is shaped in a way that doesn't reward it for obvious reasons.

There's a golden ratio somewhere, it feels like Reddit has become overflown with posts and empty discussions, even on relatively niche subs. I could get behind a more sane approach to my web browsing habits but of course it will take some time.

both parents out of the house working

This was largely the norm even in the western world up until the late 1940s. What sucks is that in the process we've lost "the village" to help raising kids and now couples just try and power through on their own.

He was doing exactly the same to defenders in Europe in his prime.

Writing's on the wall unfortunately