Anything that uses npm is fundamentally untrustworthy. I would argue that if you make an editor you should write software for people that want to use and write good software, which isn't anyone that unironically uses npm with anything other than distaste.

Europe has for a long time been the cradle of fascism. This type of behaviour should be seen as more of the same.

It can be thought of the same way, but not from the perspective that's under discussion. As such it doesn't really add anything except a new perspective. Why are you introducing it, what does it add?

You don't have to worry about tax implications when timing stock sale.

It's not really common except in a specific political climate (specifically one pressured by propaganda). Unlike the examples of the two koreas, colloquially the two chinas (communist china - commonly known as china - and fascist china, commonly known as taiwan) are not confusing. There's very little advantage to be gained by referring to what every reader knows as china as the PRC other than to emphasise some veiled pressure for people to figure out why on earth anyone would use that name. And in so doing discover the history of taiwan (but not too much history, lest we figure out that the origins of taiwan suck big time).

In essence, it's an artefact of propaganda.

You are objectively wrong. Public transit scales the same way free and paid (i.e. based on demand). The cost for free countrywide public transport in a country with very high quality public transportation (so not the US) is about 8k per person, per year. This isn't some insurmountable amount of money - it's not even particularly costly when you compare it to what the infrastructure costs are for cars (mostly related to accident mitigation. Especially bad in the US).

All e2e encrypted apps can do this. It's the price you pay for a completely closed ecosystem that coddles you at every turn because you're too much of a little bean to know what real security is.

Edit: this isn't a dig at you, it's a dig at how google and apple treat you

I didn't know that they are able to do this, now that I know it just makes perfect sense.

It's not, things haven't gotten that much relatively cheaper (have you looked at phones? The biggest pieces of spyware you can buy?). This is a line corporations like to feed us so we feel guilty about being bad instead of putting that where it belongs: every CEO.

To a normal human, not at all

If the dev does everything, their manager may as well be put in a basket and pushed down the river. You can be certain there are a lot of managers. The entire storyline sounds like enterprise illness to me to be honest.

The point of the intermediate server is so that you can NAT hole punch, otherwise it has little point (except maybe as a relay, which is a bad solution).

We're making good progress on hole-punching, but it isn't available yet. Once complete, that should take some pressure/cost off the transit relay machine.

Note that the transit relay only sees ciphertext (for bulk data transfers). Even the mailbox server only sees ciphertext or SPAKE key-exchange messages. No server sees plaintext ever.

Thanks for the clarification. I didn't say the relay server is a bad solution because of transfer security (although it could be an issue), but rather because it is expensive in terms of bandwidth and so is unlikely to exist long-term.