It's a demo. Crafted to show off the best side they possibly could. Who knows how well it actually works in practice when google isn't cherry picking the best results to show.
When I tried zeronet people would make pages with links to all the cool stuff they had found so you could jump from page to page following links to find more stuff. It looks like what I have seen about the start of the internet before real search engines.
This is something I remember noticing when messing with zeronet. There were no big players and no search engines but a sea of random shit people had hacked together and you would just follow links around to the other weird things people made. This kind of stuff all still exists in the greater internet but it's so easily lost under the megawebsites.
There are a lot of friends to be made on IM groups. I have found the best way to create a good community is to have it be invite only so you don't get random people joining and leaving constantly and the people who are there tend to stick around for a long time.
It's great to have video calls but as one comment pointed out, some of the companies selling these systems require the prisons to make them the only option.
Google search is very needs based. You need to search things pretty much every day, You will use their service regularly simply because it's so useful for getting things done. You don't need to check facebook every 5 minutes and make regular posts or comments.
It wasn't widely mocked. I have met numerous people who played Nintendo games with this warning and seeing some neckbeards on the threads you linked I had never seen anyone complain about it. Most people just take a break or don't play for extended times to even see the warning.
Most of googles products are not based on addiction. You use google search because you have to find something. You don't spend hours randomly browsing search results. Youtube will take a hit from this but the rest of google is not an addiction business.
Personally I'd prefer ebikes over electric scooters, You can easily get around on an ebike sweat free. But they seem like a great means of transport if a bike isn't practical for you.
Helps you manage phone addiction. Many people can't go 5 minutes without unlocking their phone so this is a tool that can show them what they are doing and help them manage their use. Every unlock and notification is a distraction from what you were currently doing.
The voice directions on OsmAnd is pretty horrid. It often doesn't say anything where there is an important turn and hardly ever says the street name to turn on to. I suspect it gets really confused by the little turning lanes on the edge of intersections which usually have no data in OSM as they aren't a real road.
If you have your phone in a dock with the screen on it's usable. Also the search is pretty bad and forget looking up most stores by name.
The logic is a native app can make a direct IMAP connection to the mail server and you can check it is doing so where as a web app has to send the login details to a server which does IMAP for the client and you can not see this last part.