Yes, but that’s the case regardless. My message going through has always depended on someone else’s cell towers, all the random routers and switches in between, and the other person’s device.
My server likely has worse uptime, and if I’m hosting from home it probably has more hops to transit through it.

The results were fine, but the work to get there was quite bad quite often.

UX polish is one of those things that just isn’t as fun to do, and isn’t as rewarding either. So pumping a bunch of money into it is going to go a long way towards making all the other hard work come out better.

In this case the helicopter came because they blocked a major highway.

A helicopter coordinating police movements during civil unrest is pretty standard anyplace that can afford helicopters. That’s definitely not just an American thing.
Do you think France is eschewing using helicopters to coordinate police movements with their current unrest?

Is it? All I saw was a helicopter with decent optics, but nothing particularly special, and cops talking on low bandwidth radios.

Even when we get to actual behavior, we see the cops starting with the assumption that they’ll be just telling people to leave and planning routes to do so, before it changes to arresting people for blocking a freeway. They make sure people are notified that they’re under arrest early, and the make sure they have adequate transportation before they begin the arrest process.

Like, there’s plenty of scary and shitty things cops do, but this wasn’t one of them.

It’s not nearly as nefarious as people seem to think. Effectively all applications that access web resources send along what they are and basic platform information.
This is part of how the application asks for content in a way that it can handle
It does a little to let you be tracked, but there are other techniques that are far more reliable for that purpose.