Good, but developers keep making bad design decisions to force user behavior

I have used the app for many years and find the core functions to be incredibly useful. However, recently the development team has been removing useful UI features in what looks like an attempt to force user behavior in a direction that suits them. This has made the app far more cumbersome to use and is making me reconsider using it on a regular basis.

For example, the team removed the option a few releases back to clear all open pages you have previously visited, which has no rationale from an end user perspective. Why would I want to manually swipe up on 50 cards to remove each instead of just hitting "clear all"?

Now, in the most recent build, it is no longer possible to clear cards on the home page you dont want or are done reading by swiping them away. You must hit the cumbersome small ellipsis target in the upper right corner and select "Hide this story", which takes much longer and is relatively speaking a great deal more effort and less natural to perform.

Intuitive core design features like this do not just disappear suddenly without a reason; the team obviously feels that by actively discouraging certain user behavior, they have something to gain. I have no doubt someone in middle management has crunched some numbers and decided that users are more likely to linger on cards the Google engine has decided they should look at (potentially the highest ad revenue generating ones!) if they force them to pause momentarily and consider whether they should deliberately make the effort to clear a card. Maybe this drives more traffic to the pages at the top of the card list, but it ultimately results in a frustrating and non-user centric experience. One that I hope will eventually lead to an overall decline in the use of this app until some suit realizes that chasing short-term revenue gains at the cost of the apps user base wasnt such a brilliant idea after all.

TBEC1 about Google, v39.0