The embrace/extend/extinguish arguments are all FUD arguments. Arguments 2 and 3 boil down to Threads effectively walling off their side, which would more or less mean de-federation. And what happens when your now free Lemmy instances starts requiring you to pay $8/month? Or what if some of the larger instances decide to commercialize and sell data? FUD is not a compelling argument: the same arguments were made about Microsoft and their open source embrace. And there are plenty of FUD arguments to make against Lemmy.

I would argue that federation with commercial entities will make for a better Fediverse. Sure Meta is subjectively Evil, but it's motives are clearer than some random dude's Lemmy instances. And by Federation there is ability to get high quality news, science and technology information. In less than a day, major players joined and were posting to Threads.

The email analogy is a false dichotomy. The reason behind the large email providers is because the cost of the running and maintaining an email server is cheaper than running your own. But you could run a trusted email service if you set up your DNS records correctly.