I'm curious how the relative difficulty between the problems can be assessed when no one knows how to solve any of them.

No they aren't, they can't even manage a vending machine.

That's Google forcing you to publish your app publicly, not the EU.

If they allow you to side load you won't need to make the app publicly available and so won't need a privacy policy.

You mention Microsoft at the same time that multiple EU governments are moving away from Windows and Microsoft Office and recommending businesses to do the same.

They're more like comparing Movies to TikTok.

Your last two sentences are contradictory. That is a very significant difference.

Another significant difference is how useful the standard library of each language is, so that you can avoid 3rd party libraries.

Also the tendency in the JS ecosystem to break libraries into tiny parts, because it helps or historically helped to ship less code to the user.

No, because Rust has a standard library that covers the basics enough to not push you to start adding decencies as quickly.

Depends on what you mean, if using batching technologies like Lightning Network it is theoretically unlimited.

If you mean on the globally replicated and stored forever blockchain, I think it's 50/s or something like that.

I keep hearing those marvels about how lightning network solves everything and gives everyone a pony, but it is currently estimated to perform about 200k transactions per day.

Pix achieves literally a thousand times that.

That usually ends up as proxies to the upstream repos, because the people managing the company repos don't have time to review every new version of a package.

At that point you're just as vulnerable to a supply chain attack.

I was with you until the talk about risk.

Low level employees are always taking far bigger risks in relative terms, the worse position a CEO will be in if all of his "risk" hits him is that they'll have to become a regular low level employee.

I believe the commenter above meant risk to the company, not the employee.