How I've learned it is, that cognitive dissonance arises when one of your beliefs or behaviours is challenged by new information. This can make you uncomfortable, and to alleviate that, people have coping mechanisms. It's probably these coping mechanisms which cause other people to say you suffer from cognitive dissonance. There's a quite good Wikipedia article on this imo.
First, this seems to be three years old. Second, he is one of the contributors to HA, HA was originally started by Paulus Schoutsen who is still an active contributor.
Companies only do things for their bottom line, not for customer demand. Also, if nobody would buy gas from Shell anymore, their gas stations would just have to be rebranded to something else. Behind the scenes the oil companies are all trading with each other.
Still, open source AI will still help the same companies getting richer because the needed computing power can be found in these data centers. The companies don't even care if it's AI, crypto or whatever the next thing is, as long as it needs lots of power and bandwidth.
Tell me about it. In the Netherlands wind farms are built, and, on paper, these datacenter companies buy up all of the energy from them. Meanwhile, the reason why these wind farms were built is to burn less fossil fuels, but that won't work now because of all the extra energy consumption.
But those other things is stuff which askes a sacrifice of you personally, while someone else's sexual orientation only needs you pointing at them. In the Netherlands where I live it's a lot less about sexual orientation (but still some), and a lot more about foreigners, be it asylum seekers or people of Moroccan descent who's grandparents were brought over in 1960's because of labour shortages.
I read earlier "someone" were a couple of college students.