What leads you to that conclusion?

C# didn’t exist in the early 90s, perhaps you’re thinking of another language?

Obligatory: 95% of paint splatters are valid perl programs

Isn’t it tacitly defending this pricing model?

I’ve worked in commercial environments where we’ve had the rug pulled on us in exactly this manner.

Sure today Tesla isn’t charging you, but the moment it is expedient for them, they will.

A lot of users here will have had the same experience with Reddit – it’s not unprecedented.

I feel the same way about Americans.

You’ve actually got it backwards. The ranking algorithm (rankdex) developed by one of the engineers that founded Baidu was published in 1996, two years before pagerank. Some of Google’s early patents actually cite the rankdex algo.

Not like it matters here

Cope

You’re putting a lot of faith in whoever packages the ‘distro’.

Obviously you have the same problem with trusting FOSS software distributions, but it’s mitigated by things like Linus’ Law and reproducible builds.

That being said, I personally use tiny11 VMs for certain non-critical things at home and work. I’d never use it for anything security related, or as my main OS, as there is a non-negligible chance that it’s compromised (and there’s basically no way of knowing).