I had a margin account long before RH, back when I was living on a grad student's salary, along with options trading approval. Even the big brokerages with trillions in customer assets have been handing these things out like candy for a long time.

All RH did was substantially reduce fees and make trading a little more exciting for unsophisticated "investors."

>True but at least brokers didn't make it so easy to get margin or options

They did. I personally tried (in addition to RH) WeBull and Fidelity. Both allowed me to access margin and options just as easily. The only difficulty I had with Fidelity was their atrocious UX (not just for options, but in every single aspect).

>then have cute animations and other tech-inspired addictive features.

Tech-inspired addictive features? Like which ones? The only "addictive" feature that RH has over Fidelity is UX that doesn't suck massively. Had to help a friend recently with something as simple as closing out a trade on Fidelity, and we spent 10-15 mins trying to figure out how to do it. This is a disgrace, given how basic and fundamental of an operation closing a trade is.

Imagine if gmail has made it extremely difficult to reply to an email, by making you click through bajillion submenus and dropdowns to even get to the textbox. That's how bad it is.

The first version of Options for Dummies was published in 2008. Robinhood was founded in 2013. So options have been reasonably mainstream for well before Robinhood too.

So basically the thing left to blame them for is good UX.