I think this happens a lot. At least a lot more than people think. Take Firefox vs Chrom{e,ium} (yes, that includes Brave). The differences are really minor and 99% of people wouldn't notice the difference. But boy do people have strong opinions. I'll make one argument for Firefox and I'm not sure other ones matter nearly as much: there needs to be competition in the browser space, and different colors of Chrome don't count. Having one backbone is good for no one. Yes, even Brave gives Google too much power over the entire internet. Hopefully Ladybird will become competitive, but in the mean time some of you should stop being dumb and use Firefox. Because frankly, it doesn't affect your browsing experience. You're just biased in your evaluation because things are "different".

The reason I brought that up is because there are so many parallels with what you're talking about with Matrix. Even down to the rewrite in rust and people acting like software hasn't improved in a decade. But the competition space is very important in chat platforms, just like browsers. You can support Signal and Matrix at the same time. They solve different problems. You can also use WhatsApp, Telegram, and/or iMessage or whatever. Competition is necessary in this space. We don't want monopolies. Especially if you're a firm believer in distributed systems! Distributed systems can become highly centralized. Just check your email account. I'll bet you have a Gmail account... I'll bet you also have an Outlook account. Or look at your phone!

Totally unrelated fun fact: people consider Coke and Pepsi an oligopoly, yet *combined* they only have a 70% market share. (This is definitely unrelated and definitely doesn't have any connection to our discussion...)