People defend it because they actually like the instagram culture and they don’t dislike the data collection. So they see our staunch opposition as a condemnation of the things they like and they get defensive. Some are bootlickers too, who just love defending corporate actions for some reason.
A strategy that has worked for me: very quickly browsing all new, just looking at community names. I barely look at the posts, just make a quick decision if it sounds interesting to me. I’ll check the sidebar and decide from there to subscribe or not. I’ve found dozens to follow and a bunch to block lol. It’s cleaning up my feed pretty nicely and my home page has a lot of content now.