They get hated on because :
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they inspect packets. They terminate the TLS sessions at their servers and reencrypt to forward to the backend. This allows them to analyze the data to spot spam, optimize compression and such
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they are used everywhere. If they go down, 30% of the internet goes with them.
Some people change phones every year, or more often than that, then there’s all the coffee makers, small electronics nobody thinks about (watches, radios), computers and laptops, tvs, speakers, smart lights, kitchen tools, cars, anything digital (like calipers), power tools… Depending on what you count, it could add up to ridiculous numbers for some, skewing the average