Engineers and scientists do try to do and make crazy things but they try to do it safely, and doing it safely costs money which he didn't want to spend.
I guess the most positive spin is that he risked and gave his life to try new things which can progress things more quickly, but he didn't just risk his own life, he risked the passengers which is unforgivable. If he were doing it solo to not endanger others then I could respect that.
The word is arrogant.
I game on PC but I understand the appeal of an Xbox. GPUs have been insanely expensive, and while not necessarily hard, building a PC can still be an overwhelming rabbit hole to research as you try to find the best configurations and deals, and even though it's improved a lot, PCs are still more prone to messing up since more configurations are harder to test.
What's a boomer shooter?
I think it's more of a generational thing than an age thing. Younger generations that grew up surrounded by games don't think it's weird and I while you do have less time to game as you get older I don't think it'll ever get weird.
I'm also not sure how it's enforceable in a distributed system.
That's my bet too. They weren't hosting the site itself on GCP but they were using them for trust and safety services, and I bet that one of those services was anti scraping prevention with things like ip blocking and captchas, which would explain why scraping suddenly became a problem for them the day their contract ended. It can't be a coincidence.