The hyper anarcho-capitalist mentality

I just disagree this is ideological. I see it as mostly practical:

1. Centralized node services introduce a central point of failure due to natural downtime, DoS (of various kinds, not only the dumb flooding DDoS that is most common etc.), and other reasons. If significant businesses of which there are several in the Steem ecosystem, run their own nodes which they can easily do, there would be far less of the ecosystem offline just because one or a few node operators has "an issue".
2. Free-for-the-user services encourage inefficiency and overall cost. There is no telling how many inefficient spam bots and other low-value services are using the Steemit public APIs simply because they are free. If they had to pay for a service (public but paid-for), or pay to run their own nodes, the would either improve their code to be more efficient or stop running it. There is no incentive to do either this when the costs can be shifted to someone else, who then faces an escalating cost structure to continue to provide service at an acceptable quality level.

If Steemit wants to offer free node service, arguably on their own dime (though in reality subsidized by stakeholders accepting the ninja-mine), I can speak out about it being a harmful and broken model, which I have. If someone else wants to do it, and solicit SPS funds, I can still speak out about it being a broken model but also oppose the funding that would go to subsidize it.

As far as applications like wallets, the place where the investment should go is not more big nodes to become a point of failure and inefficiency, it is lighter consensus models which allow wallets to sync to the chain without downloading all of it, with a modest, but generally acceptable, increase in the degree of trust required (rough equivalent of SPV on Bitcoin). In the case of DPoS this means delivering a chain of witness changes. This doesn't exist afaik. It has been discussed for years going back to Bitshares, but nobody takes on developing it, and instead people just keep using API nodes with no decentralized validation at all.

and doesn't realize they are public goods

That's because they aren't.

API node service is not at all a public good in terms of actual economics. It is both excludable and rivalrous. (The blockchain itself, by contrast, is actually a public good.) Wishing something to be a public good does not make it so.