I'm not quite sure why you fetishise a bit-for-bit over semantic equivalence. Doesn't it turn "it works on my machine" into "it works on my machine as long as it has this sha: ... "?
Now you mention it, the Mars thing was - and continues to be - another unscientific pipedream. The examples I gave were all plainly stupid and/or disgusting at the time.
Sexually harassing his employees hit the headlines in 2016; rumours before that. Inserting himself into the Thai cave rescue and the "pedo guy" slander was 2018. Hyperloop was 2013. No Lidar on Tesla. If you've been paying attention he's been outing himself for a long time.
The "satisfaction" is probably novelty. UK/EU, nobody thinks about it.
I think there's a kind of fetishisation of manual transmission in the US. Like your emergency scenario: I guess if you need to accelerate away from 30-50 feral hogs then you might welcome it.
You typically learn to feel the accelerator and brake with one foot but just engage the clutch (ie, all the finesse is letting the clutch out). But you know this. All your muscle memory works like that. When you switch to automatic, just use the one foot and it works much better.
You have probably already worked that out but it's handy advice if you're a passenger in an automatic with a first-time driver who is used to manual.
Some of the GoF patterns over-emphasise inheritance, but by-and-large, you don't build large systems without either using or rediscovering software patterns, whether they're OO, FP, or what-have-you.
You haven't read it, but that's what you reckon? Okay.
As to the other point: JKR's stuff is trite and derivative, but I do think that some of its "problematic" aspects are likely just because it's regurgitating European fantasy tropes, which themselves may (originally or later on) encode antisemitism and so on.
And when it comes to it, subjecting any popular series to close reading with an eye for affront is likely to show up its flaws. Just think of all the janitors who blew up with the death star.
But Brown's stuff is utter garbage (not to mention just ripping off "the Holy Blood and the Holy Grail", which was pretty awful to begin with) - if you have the chance to pick it up second-hand I'd encourage you to see if you can finish it.
I'm not quite sure why you fetishise a bit-for-bit over semantic equivalence. Doesn't it turn "it works on my machine" into "it works on my machine as long as it has this sha: ... "?