Earlier this week there was a post about the gym and daily task reward changes...

I think Niantic intentionally increases the amount of daily activities (and short term events etc.), to slowly make players play more each day.
While none of that is necessary, there is an increasing amount of free stuff to miss out on, if you don't engage. Some of it we were used to getting already (coins), some of it may seem necessary, depending on your playstyle (TMs, dust, xp, etc.) and some of it is not just for you but also your friends (gifting&while not daily, trading (lucky trades, maybe mass trades, espeacially trade evos)).
Don't get me wrong, I enjoy(ed) spending a lot of time on the game, but I miss the old times, when you could choose days in which you spend less than a minute on PoGo, without missing out on anything you couldn't get another day (ignoring catch/spin caps). Now you'd need to spend hours for all the "quick" things, of which you can only do a limited daily amount of.

When I started playing, the daily activities were 1 catch&spin, losing 1+gyms and getting the raid pass (Events were long enough that you could take a break while it ran and still play a lot). Now, opening 20+gifts is a given for many, that takes about 5 minutes in my experience (when done fast), mostly due to lag and bad UI. You can send up to 100 per day, while most probably do less, every single one takes way to long for something not fun but just tedious. The "effort" may seem appropriate for the reward (friend level/luckies), but I would rather show effort in some fun way and not by having to maneuver through a buggy system. Many probably also take care of their daily quest (with generally declining motivation due to bad streak rewards) and are working on their best buddies. I worked on 21 best buds daily, took me about half an hour a day, when I just did the basics (feed,snap,battle,play). Most probably do less, but it took me about 2 hours in total to a best buddie at "minimum effort", for a difference so minimal, you mostly want it for the mirror in PvP, yet many (including me) have wasted at least about 2 hours of their time on multiple such slightly better pokemon. Less widespread is the engagement in GBL and PVP rewards. GBL offers 5+ daily rounds of 5 games, each game takes minutes (except for tanking etc.), and on top of that, PvP between friends has rewards for the first 3 daily games. Battling for all rewards would take up to around 2 hours. And now, with the new coin system, you are "forced" to play for a couple of minutes a day, if you want to get the coins you could have gotten prior without having to open the app each day, if long term defenders of yours fell that day.

I think with events it's more "problematic". We've long gotten to a point where you can't plan much, without "risking" to miss something. I remember in the first season of Silph Arena, there were multiple instances of Silph Cups colliding with suddenly announced events. The most annoying instance was Lapras Raid day. April 23, The Silph Arena announced, that the first regionals (to qualify for the first worlds) would be hosted between May 10th and May 26th. Most cities decided to host it on the last weekend to give time for training. May 16, Lapras Raid Day was announced, it came with the double legacy moveset many PvPers long tried to trade for. The date was May 25th and many Regional Silph Cups were at that exact time and couldn't be moved, some players chose Lapras raids instead. My regionals were also that day and although I was happy that I won, I also was quite annoyed that I had to choose between the potential of a worlds invitation and a beatiful shiny with important moves on a pokemon you generally only see when there's a specific event.
In general more and more days are being filled with (sometimes overlapping) events, which are getting quite short, compared with earlier events. Now we "need" calender graphics to see the extend of events and the question is not "when is an event" anymore, but "which few days don't have an event".

What also took my motivation of the game is the generally strongly increased direction into powercreep (shadow boost), exclusive stuff (multiple new exclusive moves per month, some on single encounters; genesect (first paywalled for GL, later F2P avaiable, but only with weekly interaction)), scarcity of most new pokemon, and increased monetisation (elite TMs, global events requiring money directly, distance raids were implemented so we could pay for them not to help us (since you can't even use regular passes during the pandemic and there would be other ways of receiving legendaries, which Niantic chose to ignore); "play at home" seems more like "pay at home" with incense, raid and even egg events (already having an uptick since about last years Go Fest "rewards" including shiny regionals and regular unowns in eggs, that many didn't get despite going to the limit(regionals were in 7ks, not sure about unown)); every new feature has some overpriced stuff (poffin, GBL unlock, etc.))

I may have drifted slightly off topic, but I think this is part of a general trend, strongly increasing since late last year. More powercreep, daily activities, shorter events→more engagement needed to "not miss out" → more motivation to cash in for shortcuts + generally stronger monetisation.
I hope this trend dies off.

but I think the invite friends to raid feature is supposed to help with this win a raid task

Most likely the friend receiving the invite will still have to use a remote raid pass, so you're still paying 100 coins to get 20 coins.

Are you getting the gym coins since they restored it to 6/hr?

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Coin payout has been decreased to a max of 30 per day.

The initial change was to the coin per hour rate to something so feeble it was virtually impossible to hit the coin cap (at the time 50 per day) with 24 hours of holding a gym. This went along side launching the daily task list that rewarded 5 coins for completion of all the tasks.

After a pretty decent backlash, another round of changes to the system saw the rate restored to the old per hour rate, however the max payout per day was dropped to 30, coinciding with the task list reward changing to 20 per day.

I found with the 2/hr rate I felt bad knocking people out if they hadn't been there a day. Now with a 5 hour window most gyms are fair game. If the shortest is 6hours old then most of the defenders will be happy to be knocked out. I think it encourages more gym turnover, and less anger at turnover.

that's not what random means.

There's still an underlying probability distribution. The question is how frequently it's showing up. Whether the 5 (or however many) days in a row is a common occurrence, or only happens rarely. The underlying probability is what matters.

The tasks seem to be the same for everyone. different players don't get different tasks.
There was a 1 week period where it only showed up once, apart from that its there 5 days a week, how is that super rare?