You refuse to learn something because you are afraid that that thing might change and require you to learn new things? Maybe this isn’t the best industry for you.
He's very much not saying this, he's saying he doesn't want a small number of very large companies to be in control of whether or not his skills are valuable at market. This could broadly be construed as an argument against the entire cloud/SaaS/PaaS/IaaS market, but it is still a very valid criticism. Most IT people are in some way subordinated by massive companies, and free/open source software is an escape hatch on that, because there's not a relationship of exploitation or control between users and community projects.
I refuse to learn anything about any propietary technologies unless you pay me for every minute I spend doing it. and I'll probably get right on to forgetting it if you stop paying me, but won't really cuz my memory and experience are mine and Severance (tv series) is still fiction
I don't think anyone was talking about learning to use whatsapp. Grandfather post directly says they won't bother to learn how to use public clouds as an example, because the APIs might change.
That's their decision, but it's a career limiting one, akin to saying the VAX has everything I need and it won't be changing so I refuse to learn any other system.
I feel like I comprehend, I just disagree. It's fine to be an absolutist about these sorts of things but I have to put dinner on the table and my customers run the kit they run and I don't get to declare if it's "free enough" for me to interface with.
