I feel like this isn’t the “betrayal” that it’s made out to be.

Twilio won at their niche. People often talk about “if we just get 1% of the market…” — is there a modern engineer on earth who hasn’t used Twilio’s API at least once?

They’re moving towards doing the same thing with other parts of tech companies, in this case it’s marketing. It’s not like their APIs change because of it, these are additional products they’re introducing. Engineers generally find anything marketing related icky, but they’re very happy to collect the checks which are funded through these icky distribution methodologies.