memes

I think what happened is:

-Initially it was terrible, but it was not imposed on you, so you just ignored it and kept typing as if it weren't even there, unless you legit could not figure out how to spell a word.

-Then it got better and gave decent suggestions occasionally, so people started integrating into their typing workflow as an assistant to quickly complete common words, or to figure out longer/more complex words.

-Somewhere along the way it began to impose itself on your typing to the point where it was expected that you would accept its suggestions the majority of the time. So even if it's right 98% of the time, having to manually fight with it every other sentence is a MAJOR hassle

As a simple illustration of the last point, I remember the default behavior was that if you started to backspace an autocorrected word, the system assumed it got it wrong and let you fix it. Now the default behavior is to ignore you and keep autocorrecting until you tap a special key to insist you know what you are doing (at least on my Samsung phone)