IMO the way to prevent such a scenario from happening is not by blocking Meta, but by inviting equally large competitors to join the fediverse. The described tactic can only work if you have close to a monopoly.

How come that one shitty device has a range of steps rather than a single number of steps?

Before that self driving cars, before that “Big data”, before that 3D printing, before that internet TV, before that “cloud computing”, before that web 2.0, before that WAP maybe, internet in general?

Some of those things did turn out to be game changers, others not at all or not so much. It’s hard to predict the future.