I love the top gear reference, but surely May would have been the obvious choice, Hammond is just asking for a crash!

Comforting and Terrifying.
Comferrifying?
Terriforting?

So you won’t use your banks website?
Or your utilities (gas/water/electricity/internet)?
You won’t let your kids use the portal at their school for submitting assignments?
Your government sites for renewing your drivers license or scheduling hard refuse pickup?

I can think of lots of reasons that will force me to have chrome installed if this goes ahead.

The US (which is where I assume you are), has the second largest one in the world in current operation:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_County_Pumped_Storage_Station

Short answer, it scales fine.
Now you need to find someone to pay for it.

Yes, but you would be seeing ALL posts from everywhere your instance knows about.

I kind of like the idea of being on lemmy.world, filtering to say aussie.zone and getting it to show me local.
Or being able to simply get a list of every community on another instance.

These are cool ideas.

The first 90% of the task takes 90% of the time.
The last 10% of the task takes the other 90% of the time.

JavaScript (TypeScript) has access to cookies (and thus JWT). This should be handled by web browser, not JS. In case of log-in, in HTTPS POST request and in case of response of successful log-in, in HTTPS POST response. Then, in case of requesting web page, again, it should be handled in HTTPS GET request. This is lack of using least permissions as possible, JS should not have access to cookies.

JavaScript needs access to the cookies, they are the data storage for a given site.
To protect them, the browser silos them to the individual site that created them, that’s why developers haven’t been able to easily load cross domain content for years, to mitigate XSS attacks.
The security relies on the premise that the only valid source of script is the originating domain.
The flaw here was allowing clients to add arbitrary script that was displayed to others.
You’re dead right that only the way to fix this is to do away with JavaScript access to certain things, but it will require a complete refactor of how cookies work.
I haven’t done any web dev in a few years, this might even be a solved problem by now and we are just seeing an old school implementation. 🤷

Threads will mainstream threads.
Any good content here will be available to the Threads users, who will be oblivious to where it is coming from.
Eventually, Meta will take steps to break compatability, and lots of the most prolific contributors from here will move to Threads exclusively (for a host of valid reasons).
When it is no longer in Meta interest to federate, they will stop.

The fediverse will continue, but it will be weakened by it’s temporary reliance on Threads (who could afford to host large images/videos/etc, have lower latency, etc etc).

The stated reason is that there’s too many bad actors coming from here, so it’s too hard to moderate:

https://beehaw.org/post/567170

Hopefully (as they state in their post), federation will resume once things settle into a new norm.

Or I forsee beehaw losing relevance as it continues to pursue an isolationist policy.

I moved from aussie.zone to lemmy.world already to get around federation issues.
Now beehaw.org has stopped federating with lemmy.world 🤷‍♂️

I don’t want to have half a dozen accounts so that I can access all the niches of this system, and yet it’s beggining to look like the dream of federation is stillborn.

I personally use a bash script triggered by cron on my server to first determine my external IP address: curl http://v4.ident.me/ then if it differed from the last check, would update one of my dns entries via the godaddy API.

This can be a simple or as complicated as you like.

Absolutely possible.
The key to simple self hosting is to have a dns record that points to your externally accessible IP, whether that be your real one or an external one hosted at a VPN provider.
If that IP changes, you’ll need to update it dynamically.

It’s becoming increasibly common to be a requirement to do so as CGNat becomes more widespread.

One of the newer ways to do that is with a Cloudflare Tunnel, which whilst technically is only for web traffic, they ignore low throughput usage for other things like SSH.