Steam OS is easy, you can install literally any other distro. With regards to steam itself sadly we don't live in a fairytale land where everything can be FOSS, there aren't enough people motivated to work for free. Steam drm is great it makes publisher executives happy, while being extremely easy to crack.
Outside companies almost never get the same benefits as local ones, that's true even outside of china. Another thing is that china has national interests in chinese carmakers.
In europe there are categories. For example category B is where regular vehicles up to 3.5t (at full capacity) are. They also have quite strict pedestrian safety regulations. Due to weight and pedestrian safety american trucks don't actually fit in this category and require an additional category C license. Being in category C opens you up (depending on the country) to additional road taxes, road usage limitations and even might not allow you to enter certain areas.
Because 90% of the time 50 miles is enough for you (maybe not you, but most people) to get through the day and charge it, while you will only need gas on those long occasional trips.
Except for the fact that he's making a lot of shit up, I'm from eastern europe and none of his stories about Poland, Lithuania and Kievan Rus were accurate at all.
While I completely agree that it is a very bad idea to drive with one, you have to give credit where credit is due. Apple really did an amazing job at reducing latency of the passthrough. That being said it's still added latency and it's a very very narrow FOV so please don't go driving/walking around with that thing.
I think that "subpar" are slightly different to US and Russia though.