I am not saying that more people using Linux is bad or that people shouldn’t use it (I mean, check my own post history; I am a recent convert myself), but if it reached the kind of saturation that Windows or Apple enjoys, it would bring not liberation but enshittification.
Nor am I trying to be some kind of elitist “the plebs don’t deserrrrrrve it” schlub; hell, I use Linux Mint Cinnamon and have to have a guide to handhold me through all but the most rudimentary, familiar-to-me-as-a-Windows-user tasks.
However.
A bar to entry (even such an ankle-high one as there is now) keeps Linux relatively off the radar of large, moneyed interests that would otherwise descend onto Linux distros and enshittify them in a heartbeat.
In other words, rather than “everyone who uses Linux will then see how bad they’ve had it under Windows and how anti-consumer certain software companies (let’s say Adobe for example) have been treating them!”, the more likely outcome would be “now there is Adobe Photoshop Linux Edition that is exclusive to the paid Adobe Linux distro” or other similar shackles and lockdowns and limitations (for which your credit card is the key), and the alternatives, not having ad money or corporate backing to prop them up, would be left by the wayside as other such enshittified distros/softwares gained users and traction.
Hell, just because a non-enshittified alternative to an enshittified software exists doesn’t mean people will know about or use it. To use an example, Excel is hardly the only way to make a spreadsheet. But it’s the one that is used, taught, known, documented, and widespread. It doesn’t matter that [some other software] is superior in every way if no one knows or cares about it.
Admittedly this is kind of my shower-thought guess and it’s not as if I have sat and thought through this thoroughly, but heck, here we are. Lay it on me.
The communities of enthusiasts, purists, and OSS advocates, I think would push back hard against any enshitification. And the license models would allow those same people to revert any changes made by moneyed interests by simply forking the software and making it better.
You already kind of have examples of that happening. RHEL and SUSE are both owned by corporate interests. Both have open source alternatives both upstream and downstream of them. History has already shown that when either do shitty things, people push back, and if that push back fails they fork it and fix it themselves.