This works when users broadly understand the concept of a user agent, which has not ever really been the case in the general sense, and indeed we observe a hist

This works when users broadly understand the concept of a user agent, which has not ever really been the case in the general sense, and indeed we observe a historical trend toward increase in the conceptual distance between usership and agency. Your hot take reduces to that the web should never have become a product, which is equally defensible and in my view the formulation more likely productive of interestingly nuanced discussion. For example, we could critique the Gopher and Gemini crowds' sort of conceptually Sapir-Whorf-esque approach to at least notional redress, or ask what effect clientside inference might come to have.