It's simple. Most software today is not created to serve the user. It is created to accomplish certain goals (e.g. obtaining money, attention, data, or prestige from the user) and only serves the user as incidental to accomplish those goals.
I think that's probably true in the SaaS world. I'm seeing the same mentality take hold in the open source world with "opinionated" or "curated" software. Tools that have limited options or actively remove options and expect the developer to conform to them. I think it's being driven by this same notion of "options = bad" that we see in UX in general, but maybe they're coincidental, but unrelated phenomena.
I agree with this. Most software doesn't need to be "opinionated" and would be made better with more options and carefully chosen defaults.
I think it's sometimes appropriate to reduce options, mainly in cryptography libraries. There the library should provide all the secure options and none of the wildly insecure options, maybe with some "secure if used correctly" options behind some heavy warnings. Likewise for anything else that might similarly be used in safety-critical situations: it MUST be easy to use, and hard to misuse. That tends to mean having fewer options, and making very careful choices about defaults.
