As much as I loved my Nexus 4, there's no denying its camera and battery were quite poor. I wouldn't call it the best phone ever made, even at its time
Granted, that's very keyed to my own needs for a phone. I replaced the N4 battery twice, on my own. I don't care whether my phone has a crappy 8 MP camera, or even a 1 MP camera, because I have a real camera. It's there for convenience or video chats.
On the other hand, I agree with you that there's plenty of room for improvement on the N4. But I don't think I've seen a significantly better phone. Certainly every phone I've had since then (and I'm careful to choose phones that meet my needs, not go for the flashiest model) has been worse.
Funnily enough, back when I was doing improv at school/university, I've found a great portion of the people there to be among the most self-absorbed people I've ever met. A lot of them were genuinely funny people, but there was a lot of ego, tribalism, people wanting to be stars, etc etc. It was actually one of the reasons why I got scared out of continuing in a local league after graduation, even if I'd done it for four years and thoroughly enjoyed it.
Same happened to me. I was deeply involved in the local improv community for a few years, and it was great at first, but a few toxic people drove me away for good.
My theory is it is a gathering place for people with narcissistic traits -- I mean, part of the appeal is being the center of attention and having everyone think you're brilliant and hilarious.
(Again, though, we all have narcissistic traits, but few of us are actually full-on narcissists.)
Another big difference is the freshness of the content. The "modern web" will bury anything that is not new or trendy and make it virtually disappear for everyone that isn't looking for it specifically.
On the "old web", content freshness is what the creator wants it to be. Old articles can still be as relevant five years down the line, given that the author updates it as needed. Cool and weird stuff can still be cool and weird after the fact, doesn't depend on word-of-mouth or algorithms to "live", doesn't have to be "released" on a schedule, and doesn't have to compete against other creators. It just exists for people to stumble upon eventually: the when doesn't matter.
Most privacy advocates don't defend it because it allows you to scheme against the government, they do it because it protects people from falling too deep in the net of actors that would try to influence their behaviour.
I agree that you're most likely not doing anything interesting in the eyes of the authorities in your home, most people aren't. But advertisers and content creators definitely care, and that's where the true problem is. They shouldn't have the power to anonymously collect all of this data, and then decide through the power of their far-reaching services which products are accessible to you or not, what information is presented to you through means that appear transparent, and so on and so on.
The "I have nothing to hide" argument has never been what today's privacy debate was about.
If it complies to the spec, it's by definition valid syntax and suitable for production. Now whether or not you want that in your source code is totally up to you.
Just because you can write your whole app in one line of JavaScript doesn't mean you should maintain that as source code. You sure want that as your production bundle though.
