Tbh I can’t even think of a place where competition solves user-friendliness—user friendly software is highly uncommon in commercial software, let alone more broadly (i’m eying you, canonical).
There are a large number of user-hostile behaviors that stretch across industries: ad-funded software, app stores pushing microtransactions, wildly inconsistent interfaces and behaviors across DOM-driven software, opt-out behavior for things like arbitrary internet access.... user unfriendliness is the default state of software and even the most user friendly software still neglects the needs of many of their potential users.
This is a fact of software built in bounded time to be resold for passive income and “support” (which means “bug explainer” and possibly “refund-giver” in most corporate cultures).
I'd hazard to say that what you're describing (which I agree with) is true actually because in most spheres, there really ISN'T meaningful competition.
Building software is hard, generally, and takes time, generally. Just because you can throw up a set of microservices in a day doesn't mean you can build a properly competing product that quickly. And as time goes on, the standard of competition gets higher and the barrier to entry gets higher, because user expectations grow over time. So most software isn't competitive.
There are a large number of user-hostile behaviors that stretch across industries: ad-funded software, app stores pushing microtransactions, wildly inconsistent interfaces and behaviors across DOM-driven software, opt-out behavior for things like arbitrary internet access.... user unfriendliness is the default state of software and even the most user friendly software still neglects the needs of many of their potential users.
This is a fact of software built in bounded time to be resold for passive income and “support” (which means “bug explainer” and possibly “refund-giver” in most corporate cultures).