It is, yet so many people seem to love the taste of it and don't care about its toxicity in the least.

I'm going to have to go back and read about the details of this debacle, but is there anything preventing other HW wallet manufacturers from doing something similar?  I would imagine so; I even recall when the Electrum wallet for Dash was taken down from Github for what I think were political reasons, and I'm not even sure if those Dash could be restored if you didn't have the Electrum software.

Yep, my technical knowledge is still sketchy which is why all of this seems just a wee bit frightening to me.  You'd think in the world of crypto, you'd truly be in control of your coins as long as you had the seed phrase....but that's not 100% true, is it?