People fear mongering Google blocking Android "sideloading" is causing more harm than good

Agreed. However no one knows how this will work beyond “There will probably be some kind of dev mode style toggle followed by a 24 hour wait period.” That makes it hard to say anything accurate and fact based, but very easy to make speculation and fear mongering. Once we find out how specifically it’s implemented, we will be able to push back more. That or Google decides they want to kill open source after all, which would surprise me but which I cannot yet disprove.