SEK have done a ton of animation work for foreign firms. This is probably the only way they're getting outsourcing work done now since all of the sanctions were put in place.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SEK_Studio
I used a Hisense A5 Pro CC phone for a few months as my daily driver. For books, colour eink is okay at best but yeah, contrast sucks. It pretty much always will with the extra layers of filtering needed for each colour.
Outside of static pages of text and images, you pretty much need to drop colour depth to pretty garish levels for a decently responsive user experience. It's a nice idea but really isn't very good in practice.
I have a Milk-V Mars but it really isn't performant enough for any task I have for an SBC. Distro support seems to be a pain too, as the provided Debian image isn't meant to run on repos aside from a Debian snapshot from 2022.
I really do hope things improve. I'm planning on moving over to an RK3588 ARM board for desktop daily drivering but one day I'm hoping a decently affordable RISC V alternative will turn up.
Most of my family here in Australia use iPhones, and by extension, iMessage. Granted, they also use FB Messenger, Snapchat and all the rest, but mainly iMessage. It's the default and it works for them.
I can assure you that this is not a thing exclusive to the US.
Mastodon and Misskey are both getting a little overstuffed. Neither are particularly nimble, with Masto moving to further "professionalise" itself and Misskey (forks included) having way too much stuff on offer in terms of features.
Regarding clients, Kaiteki seems to be the best Misskey client I've found on mobile. The native PWA was an absolute pain the last time I used Misskey. The anime issue with it probably stems from it's Japanese origin and most big instances seen as refuges for artists banned off Twitter.
I've personally switched to GoToSocial, which seems to fill all the Mastodon-shaped holes without gulping down resources.
Event planning platforms are never going to compete with massive social communication platforms, they're entirely different ends of the stick.
As long as Mobilizon continues to work, that's all I ask for.