The escape hatch is the feature that force everyone to be nice.
What if you don't like Windows 11 forcing to make an account? You get a time machine, go back 30 years and start a hobby OS project and hope the best.
What if you don't like Linux? You fork the project and just ignore what Linus publish in his tree. (The hard part is doing a better job than Linus and convincing enough people that you can do it.) So Linus must be nice enough to keep most people happy.
Not _most_ in the sense of a plurality of all users. _most_ in the sense of some subset of contributors. Free software is still a dictatorship of the able. A person who cannot contribute (whether that be code or money to pay someone else to code) something important is still without recourse.
If Linus decided to add a bunch of malware to the kernel, my mom would still be unable to fix that.
FOSS is still better than proprietary, but it's not perfect either.
You are right, but your mom would easily benefit from someone else who would be able to fix that: free software relies on the fact that someone "able" is at least not looking to hurt you, which is, for a popular enough software, a given.
For software that is not popular enough, you are right that in practice, your mom wouldn't be able to do anything other than stop using the software.
But of course FOSS is not perfect, it's just a way to empower your users: nothing more, nothing less.
What if you don't like Windows 11 forcing to make an account? You get a time machine, go back 30 years and start a hobby OS project and hope the best.
What if you don't like Linux? You fork the project and just ignore what Linus publish in his tree. (The hard part is doing a better job than Linus and convincing enough people that you can do it.) So Linus must be nice enough to keep most people happy.