Nice write up. But: what's the gain for meta? Embrace, extend, extinguish is what you do to competition. Don't forget meta is a Corp. Corps do things for money. All I see in your example is a cash drain. Corps don't do cash drains. By joining the fediverse they get all that sweet content.... For free. No hosting. No administration, just.. Content. That's the best deal ever for any data firm.
I do see plusses for meta so my take is: embrace? Yes. Extend? Yes. Extinguish? No visible upside, just downsides. So no.
This is no Microsoft in the 90s. Meta's product is data. Not office suites or an OS. Why pay for data when the fediverse provides you that for free?
Liftoff has all those weird issues regarding subscribing to communities, I got a "not logged in" or general authorization API error.
I just downloaded connect and so far, so good. I can see my subscriptions, I can post... It also looks somewhat familiar as a Sync user.