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"Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

("could care less" is an idiom - no doubt not one that's used everywhere)

it's also a spelling of "couldn't care less" spoken colloquially with the "'nt" swallowed, i think, and many just repeat what they hear so it becomes the idiom, to your point.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/could-couldnt-...

As with the use of 'literally' to mean 'figuratively', it's now fairly standard and acceptable.

Not in serious writing

This is a short magazine article about cats, not an academic treatise.

Surprised the tabby mutation is so recent.

I could have sworn I'd seen older depictions in Buddhist art from India, but I'm probably confusing images representing tigers.

This is a grammatically correct sentence. It is a misuse of an idiom but semantic/idiomatic checks are not trivial.

In my experience cats are remarkably aloof and seem like they couldn’t care less about me if they tried.

More social animals such as dogs seem to care a bit too much about what I’m doing, and I feel like they could care less.

</pedantry>

Cats can always care even less than you previously thought possible.