Religion is not the goal of conservatives, it's a tool to preserve hierarchy in the society. Capitalism is another tool that achieves that.
The people that aren't wealthy but are conservative benefit from hierarchy enforced by religion. It ensures that they're not on the bottom of society - that place is intended for various minorities.
Don't know about Android but on iOS health information is something that an app can request on OS level.
There are valid uses for this, for example hearing level measurements from third party app can be added to Health app and then used for adjusting equalizer for AirPods via accessibility options. Or your menstrual cycle (although that probably won't make your AirPods sound better) or many other data points. This is what Threads is trying to access.
It's not about what you post but what data will Threads/Twitter/FB apps will trick you into sharing on system level (location etc).
Back in the day, like many people then, I had a couple of different accounts across multiple messaging platforms. 2 domestic ones, couple of international ones. It was a fun mess but people were tired of running multiple apps and so loads of multi-protocol apps were developed.
Usually messaging protocols were simply reverse engineered and some apps also used plug-ins so that niche protocols could be added by community. Some also did gateways that translated proprietary protocols to XMPP.
By the end of that era many platforms opened themselves up with XMPP. It was nice because most of those multi-protocol apps didn't have to support as many different platforms explicitly.
But that's about it. I had a Google Talk account too and found it cute that I can use it to add my friends on other platforms. I was a nerdbut barely knew any other people that were utilizing it. Realistically it didn't make any difference because you still had to use multi-protocol app for the ones that didn't open.
Soon platforms that were never on or barely on XMPP started to take over. Messenger was the biggest in my country and it was always a PITA on third party apps.
Google Talk doing a rug pull on XMPP didn't to anything meaningful to XMPP itself. It was never that big and simply remains a niche to this day.
I too get an impression that a single article on XMPP Gtalk drama made round on Fediverse that many made their opinion solely on it.
The Verge peeps are rather enthusiastic about Activity Pub based platforms, I wouldn't attribute bad intent there.
Linux is used by most of the world but it's either backend where techies take care of things or super streamlined experiences like Android etc.
If you're at the extreme bottom there's little chance to move upwards in capitalism but it's comforting to have some undesirables who have it even worse than you.