Google worked on Privacy Sandbox/Topics API/FLoC for at least five years, and it couldn't get something that advertisers, regulators, and users could all agree on, so it's just falling back to the thing that worked (but has next to zero privacy protections). Sigh.
I mostly use Mastodon, but I 100% get it. The onboarding process is much easier with centralized services (no need for analogies to email), and more importantly, you're not at risk of losing half your follows/followers when server admins have a pissing match. As long as those friction points exist, there will be a market for centralized platforms.
This article is really wrong, wow. There is already a Manifest V3-compliant version of uBlock Origin, it's discussed in this thread: https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBlock-issues/issues/338
I don't know if it's stated definitively anywhere, but I'm pretty sure the plan is to roll out that different version to Chrome users as an update to the existing extension. It's going to be slightly worse because MV3 is still missing some API features.
Bitcoin's value is significantly more volatile than the US Dollar.