I agree with you and the premise, in general.

Unfortunately even the little bits of data that are gathered can form a bigger picture over even a few years. See the recent acquisition of Ancestry.com by Blackstone (a finance company, IIRC) - now pretty much all of us have some of our genealogy held by them. Why would a finance company want that data(rhetorical question).

Serious question - is it really that hard to just have a spreadsheet?

I can’t imagine having so many subscriptions that a pretty simple spreadsheet couldn’t handle it.