Yikes, I immediately thought of exactly the same thing, sending all that data to third parties? no thank you my browser should be my safe space not leaking things itself

You answered yourself there, Hack is still very widely used inside meta, just less so in IG.

This is classic israeli tech. If you're not aware, some people like to say that the israeli tech industry is divided into two - There's a lot of good talent working for the big multinational companies/startups that are targeting US/EU/Asia, and the local market gets the scraps that remain. This is how we end up with really shitty local apps and services, but export really good product to everyone else. It sucks - the local market is too small to have real competition, so shitty apps gain a monopoly easily and never budge from their spot. This is just another example of the talent working for local stuff being bad, it's not new and it's not surprising, although this time it's much bigger obviously.

This is classic market distribution in any country, including the US, in any profession, including highly regulated ones.

It's more extreme because the domestic market size is a fraction of the US' domestic market.