Submitting and getting a talk about it accepted at DEF CON seems like a good way that worked here. Of course having name recognition like CDC going back to my childhood also helps :-)

My M2 Max MBP with 64GB RAM can have a decent chunk of apps open while handling 1500 open browser tabs in about 50GB of RAM with no swap. As an example. Used quite a bit of swap on my M1 16GB previously.

That’s…not what a walled garden is. It’s volunteer-driven development, something that will be available in 6-8 weeks is NOT a walled garden, which is something created by companies to keep you within their ecosystem so they can capture more revenue by you spending more time there. You had to do something technical but free (and also run by the author) to test a beta of an unreleased so-far free app in advance—no one forced you to do anything.