I would guess the sudden influx of massive amounts of traffic would force them to charge for the service, and they don't want to do that. Requiring a phone number, while invasive to some, does cut down on a tremendous amount of automated/bot/spam traffic.

Signal is obviously a honeypot

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

My bet would be ulterior motive.

no screenshots?

I have a hard time feeling sympathy for tatsumoto because every interaction I had with him was absolutely despicable. He was always a massive jerk, banned anyone who used matrix.org, frequently posted loli on matrix, and links to tons of pirated content on his site.

Very misleading writing style IMO. I would say most of their bullet points ARE actually true in most cases... they just keep bringing up somewhat rare/exotic exceptions as a way to call it a "falsehood".

Japan's penis festival comes to mind

only three android versions behind for $500? sign me up /s

No, there is no way to prevent sites from uploading the info besides just not providing it in the first place.

And because of how programming languages work, there's no way for the browser to identify that data being uploaded "is" anything specific, especially when there's things like encryption, obfuscation or just re-arranging the data itself into larger collections of data.

except I like being trolled too. not everyone thinks the same

Please give several reasons why

Maybe this will lead to the Internet going back to how it used to be in the beginning. Wouldn't that be something.