I agree with your sentiment, but I wouldn’t call activism (and especially not journalism) a wasted effort in that regard. Bringing issues to light is the first step in creating a visible dent in the balance sheets. Public perception shapes consumer behavior to some degree and can put pressure on lawmakers to introduce legislation against harmful conduct. On the other hand, if the general public only hears the company’s side of the story underlining how clean and ethical they are, there will never be any pressure for change.

Personal theory of mine is *.itjust.works meant to stand for “It Just Works” until they decided to give this Lemmy thing a go.

Yep it’s referencing a meme that originated almost a decade ago. https://youtu.be/nVqcxarP9J4

Furthermore, even if you wanted to operate an instance on a small scale you’d still have to deal with the full volume of posts from the rest of the Lemmyverse getting pulled and saved to your instance. If we had Reddit levels of activity here, every instance host with more than a couple dozen users would basically end up maintaining their own personal database copy of Reddit (more or less, provided those users were still joining the popular communities across the 'verse) which doesn’t sound like something I’d want to deal with as a hobbyist.