I don't really think the pace of linguistics is honestly keeping up with technology. What consumer meant ten years ago is vastly different than what it means today. The idea that someone could be a "Youtuber" is honestly still baffling to me because what any given person on Youtube could do / has done is so diverse. There's everything from journalism to op-ed to biographies to history and beyond. We have a far more direct connection to companies than we ever had in the past, and even when they were fraught before, they're even more deeply fraught now, as those connections have greatly upended what a corporation even is. Consumers don't consume media the way they used to. Even the way games are frequently consumed is different from the past, and that has greatly changed what the term itself means but we haven't actually created or adjusted linguistic terms for these technologically more connected terminologies. So I agree that at least in theory, from a historical point of view, consumer isn't really a word we can use, because the term itself comes from a time when the social, political and economic connections we made with businesses were far different than they are now.
