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My own tendency in 5e is to tell people who are proficient in a thing what the DC is if it's perceptible and I might not wait to be asked. I also gate some rolls behind proficiency both in the sense of "You must be proficient to even try" and in the sense of "If you are proficient you do not...

If the PC can plausibly perceive the DC of the task it's not advocating for any kind of third-person cutscene or glowing numbers. It's giving the player information the character has. I agree that there may well be parts of a fortified wall the character might not be able to see and it would be...

The player has all the numbers on the sheet and telling them one more number is a way to give the player a clearer picture of what the PC is experiencing. The actual goal is to give the player the same chance to gauge the odds as the character would have.

Seems to me that whether a player is being a "weasel" is going to depend on the context here. Sometimes the player's understanding is not at all consistent with the GM's. In the 5e games I run I have a strong preference for making perceptible DCs clear to the players before they commit because I...

When players ask how a creature looks I'll often tell them in the form of "On a scale of 1 to 187 this one looks like about a 43." Neither that nor revealing AC is even in the ballpark of "showing the players the statblock."

I sincerely applaud your charity and I agree that the OP probably will need to look outside his current gaming circles to find a table he'll be happy at.

I agree the OP seems to find many of the players he games with to be exceedingly annoying. I do not think I agree with your framing as to the locus of the problem/s.

Precisely. If you want to control the story that much just write the novel.

I've been playing TRPGs since the mid-1980s and I've never seen this. I've seen mismatched expectations a time or three but nothing so over-the-top as everything the OP says.

Your example makes no sense. In the games I run any player who wanted to open a door that was locked would go about finding another way to the other side of that door. That might be picking the lock. It might be finding another route. It might be removing the door from its hinges. None of that...

Give them as much information as they need to make their mistakes or to come up with their brilliant plans. Something like that window I might mention if in the debate it seemed as though they'd forgotten it but not if it seemed they were disregarding it.

That sounds like a failure to understand tone. Either your friend misunderstood the table's tone or you misunderstood his. The GM in the original question comes across as intentionally misunderstanding what the players mean and want when they say they want their actions to matter. I agree that...

This seems like a pretty strenuous misreading of what people have said. I don't think anyone has suggested "just let the players do whatever they want however they want with no real chance of failure." Pickup groups by their nature can contain ringers and oddballs but I've never experienced...

Nah. "Actions matter" isn't a smoke screen unless the GM doesn't want them to matter. Players wanting their actions to matter as far as the fiction and the game play isn't at all the same thing as wanting a super easy pointless game and it doesn't at all mean the game reality alters to match...

Except you don't understand how a game can possibly work where what the players do matters. If the only person at the table whose actions matter is you then everything that happens at the table is on you.

If the players want to rob a bank the game becomes about how they decide to do that and whether that approach works. If the players want to play a game of politics and intrigue the game becomes about that. If the players want explore new worlds and encounter new civilizations the game becomes...

It's not a difficult concept. The players should have experiences that reflect their choices. If they set out to rob a bank they probably should not experience a game about politics and intrigue. The choices they make about how to go about robbing the bank should lead to different plausible...

Seems to be so.

Yup. It is possible to propel the narrative without trying to avoid consequences but it is not possible to avoid consequences without propelling the narrative.

I would call "avoiding consequences" a form of "propelling the narrative."