It’s because they regularly overstep their bounds and force overseas companies to do things they have no right to make them do, which actively hurt their business. Of course companies are going to do their very best to comply while making it have as little impact as possible!
It doesn’t need to be Linux though - AOSP is still open source. Companies like graphebe using it just needed to not depend on Google to provide them the hardware and software to keep their OS viable. It’s entirely on them.
Anyone that builds their entire company and/or product around being reliant on a multi-billion/trillion dollar company providing them with their source code for free so you can use it to get around using their services is only setting themselves up for disaster.
If you rely on Google giving you their source code, you need to have a backup plan ready at all times for what to do when Google don’t give you their source code.
They’re not removing a feature though, so that whole argument falls over instantly.
I don’t think it’s going to be as simple to verify as uploading a pic of an id
At this stage the EU probably pushed Google to do this. They’ve taken a sharp turn to authoritarianism.
They’re not so much working to kill custom roms as they are just not giving away their code anymore, going closed source for their own hardware.
When I visit imgur.com while on a VPN pretending I'm from the UK, it returns a "Imgur is temporarily over capacity, please try again later" error. Toggling it off and on goes from working fine to that same message over and over, so they either are having issues on servers that they are directing UK traffic to - which is possible - or they're just pretending to be having capacity issues to not raise suspicion of not wanting to comply.
“They” as singular was really only made for when you didn’t know the sex of the person you were referring to, not as a pronoun for someone who you do. It had nothing to do with “gender identity” because that wasn’t a thing. Gender and sex were synonyms, 2 words for the same thing.
Eg “can my friend come to the party too?” “Yeah sure, what do they like on their pizza so I can make sure there is one they like?”
Not
“Can John come to the party?” “Yeah sure, what do they like on their pizza?”
In this instance you’d always have used “he” because you know with pretty much absolute certainty that John is male on account of being a male name.
It has only very recently been used as a choice that people tell people they want to be referred to by, because some people now believe in a “gender identity” being a separate thing to sex.
It existing as a singular pronoun doesn’t mean that it was used in the same context as it is now.