Since some are dreaming aloud of beating WU at their own game, let's walk through the life cycle of modern tech ventures.
First, someone has a bright idea. See earlier posts.
Then they need money. The PE and VC people aren't in it to save the whales. You'll need to show them how they can get a lot for a little. Guess who calls the shots at that point?
If the idea folks say "we don't really need to turn a profit" then they'd better have deep pockets. Because to do anything at even a modest scale is going to require servers, bandwidth, admins, developers, marketing, etc. Any startup, even one with modest goals, better have a plan to deal with success. Otherwise, eventually, users will start gang raping their brain child.
So... why was it possible 15-20 years ago to have a viable company that was user centric where people would cooperate and sacrifice to innovate or create a genuine community? First, because only a fraction of the world was online. Demand didn't as easily outstrip resources. The culture was fairly uniform. But most importantly, we didn't quite yet live in a world of cosmically-sized entitlement complexes.
In 2019 investors, creators, employees, and consumers expect it all. On the business side that means maximal profit (usually accomplished thru accounting trickery and debt). On the user side that means free stuff forever.
Two acquisitions and a slew of redesigns later (including one exclusively for advertisers), WU still hasn't shed enough features to please the money gods.
For the record, I don't actually think that downloading CSV data really costs WU anything. I think it's just symbolic of corporate culture in general. The way the bosses counter stakeholders who demand more is to institute austerity ("doing more with less"). That, of course, bleeds into performance, communication, loyalty, etc. The snake is eating its own tail.