Their core products meaning search and email, sure. Everything else is on the chopping block and randomly changes all the time.

Remember when they bought Nest and literally bricked everyone's thermostats? Tasks / reminders / whatever gets completely reworked every other year. They went through a chat phase where they released half a dozen different, incompatible chat apps, and also wrote a chat sub-system into every other app they had.

They're lunatics. If all they want to do is search and email, just do that, don't waste time and consumer patience branching out into all these random things they'll drop support for in two years.

Because then someone else would be able to control and censor their content. Really every business should make their own server to ensure that they're the ones fully in control of their content - this is the entire point of federation.

what did these protests change so far?

They pushed people to other platforms.

They're one of the least reliable companies out there. Every other product gets cancelled within 2 years, and they're constantly making major redesigns for no reason.