It’s not ‘inconvenience at best’. The vast majority of people won’t use a VPN, so it will be a loss of revenue. Even if you are willing to pay for a VPN (or daft enough to use a free one), it’s an inconvenience as using a VPN can have side effects, such as other things getting blocked unexpectedly, or cause websites to redirect you to the local version in the country of your VPN server.

There is more to AI than LLMs.

Tell your friend to search for winterbreak

There is no way these things could spread poison instead of pollen is there?

You should read up on non verbal communication. As an older boomer, I am perfectly happy with working from home and a catch up on zoom/teams/slack with my team 99% of the time, and very much against return to office. But sometimes I do need face to face communication with team members I’m concerned about, or with customers.