None of which changes the fact that it's more expensive and clunkier, and none of which feels necessary.

A more expensive, clunkier product, with a bunch of needless fluff in it.

So you need to change two settings instead of one to side load. Seems rather pointless.

That's the original

How the heck do people with 4TB SD cards do data hygiene wipes of their medium before crossing international borders?

They don't

Where is that mentioned? I can't find that in the article

This is an extra service they don’t have to offer.

No, they could let you use someone else's service instead, but they've chosen to block that.

you can back it up to your computer as well

According to the article you literally can't

Although based on the comments there, the article may be wrong on that point

*plugs USB into Ethernet port

This meme didn't let me down

Plenty of people will

This is very outdated.

• Catalyst doesn't exist anymore, it was replaced by AMDGPU-PRO years ago.
• The Radeon Mesa driver (radeonsi) is generally faster than AMDGPU-PRO OpenGL for gaming, and has been for years. On the Vulkan side, performance is usually fairly close between the Mesa driver (RADV), AMDVLK and AMDGPU-PRO.
• AMDGPU is just the kernel driver, which is used by both the Mesa drivers and AMDGPU-PRO, so why is it listed separately?
• For Intel, I think the hardware was holding it back more than the driver, especially since they've replaced the classic Mesa drivers with Gallium based ones. But now they're doing the Arc stuff.
• I don't know if I would say that Nvidia proprietary runs well

It doesn't seem to be targeting ad-blockers in particular (or other page customizing extensions), although that may result eventually. What it does do is let webpages restrict what web browsers and operating systems you are allowed to use, just like how SafetyNet on Android lets apps restrict you to using an OS signed by Google. That could end up with web pages forcing you to use a web browser and OS the big players like Google, Microsoft and Apple, blocking any less restrictive or less used competors like Firefox and Linux, thus creating a cryptographically enforced oligopoly. And even if they signed e.g. Firefox, it would only be certain builds of it. That would make it impossible to make a truly open-source browser that can access pages using this API. Quite concerning.