Are you sure? I thought that what you describe is what packages suck as NikGapps did, while MicroG is a reimplementation of the code. It does call Google webservers, but it doesn’t run Google’s blobs (which is also why it’s severely limited/fragile compared to packages that run them)
Are you running the container in rootless mode (perhaps via Podman)?
Rootless containers run on an emulated network stack (slirp4netns for podman, not sure about rootless docker), since the runtime doesn’t have the privilege to touch the real one - which is the point of running rootless.
This emulation uses a decent amount of memory and torrent clients in particular open a lot of connections. My slirp4netns process eats up several gigabytes whenever the torrent container is active.
Spotube.
Note that it’s not really a Spotify streaming app, rather it uses your (free) Spotify account for playlists, search, recommendations, etc. and then goes and find the song you want to play on YouTube, and the lyrics from scraping websites I think. Pretty clever.
This is kind of a bad example because the value proposition is different but still very clear - the default version of the app provides a regular income stream to the developers. If you don’t like that, you can choose to provide an alternative income stream instead.
It is still unfair because the subscription cost is usually many times more than what the ads will earn for a single user - but it’s a matter of quantity at that point, not quality.
The Adobe case is still a much better example, IMO. Yes, they may offer regular content updates worth subscribing for, but their products could still work perfectly well as one-time purchases without access to the content stream. The only reason they didn’t is that they don’t have enough competition to be worried about customers moving away.