I do think there’s something in, because of the need to sell new versions of products and services, there’s a hell of a lot of examples of “upgrades” or updates which no-one asked for and actually make products and services worse.
Apple of course mastered this by removing headphone jacks (useful and universal), inventing their own type of pointless charger port which meant you had to buy an add-on official Apple adapter for everything, oh yeah and welding the RAM / batteries into iPhones and laptops from 2012 onwards so you have to use an Apple service to upgrade them. Absolutely none of this is an upgrade of any kind, it’s just examples of a good, popular product getting worse by reduction.
Most tech companies do this though. No one asked for Windows 10 and I bet the most used feature is still switching it back to classic view. Facebook really went off a cliff once they “upgraded” to the Feed being the centrepiece of the app so they could get more ads in your face. Twitter is of course dogshit now. A random example is that Expedia used to be a good cheap hotel aggregator, and now its pretty much unusable because it tries to offer every service under the sun, it’s like clicking through the 14 pages of random add ons you get when booking a Ryanair flight. I don’t see many apps that work better than their 2017 versions or website redesigns that considerably improve the product. Multi-factor authentication, social media integration and a login-secured “personalised user experience” is totally unnecessary when you just want to, say, order a pizza online, and it’s just an excuse to gather your Salesforce data (which 98% of companies don’t even use in an intelligent way, they just do it because everyone is doing it).
Subscription-only services (Adobe, PlayStation & Xbox live, Netflix and every other streaming app) means you don’t actually own any product, you just rent it. It doesn’t give more freedom to the user, because the second you stop paying you lose access to the product you bought. You of course pay way more for it over time (Spotify vs CDs being one area which actually benefits consumers - now that is disruptive technology.)
Planned obsolescence is another thing entirely, but there’s a lot of “innovation” for the sake of keeping everyone busy which tend to make a really successful thing slightly less easy to use.
With phones in particular the technology pretty much plateaued 7 years ago and anything new is either a meaningless gimmick or just extra digits on a number (shooting 8k footage on your OLED screen iPhone) which makes very little meaningful difference to a regular user.
God that turned into a bit of a rant.