For a community full of engineers, I'm always surprised that people always take absolutionist views on minor technical decisions, rather than thinking of the tradeoffs made that got there.

Not the OP, but my interpretation here is that if you model the replies as some point in a vector space, assuming points from a given domain cluster close to each other, replies that span two domains need to "tunnel" between these two spaces.

I think what my ideal is basically DnD, but with an AI DM.

This is something that I'm hoping the current LLM and future AI work eventually get us to. If we can get persistent context and memory, or at least a simulacrum of that, we could get to truly dynamic reactive worlds

I'd say that the internet has also strongly lowered the barriers to external propaganda and influence, which is another major factor here. When you've got a huge swarm of "people" with no stake, or even a negative stake in your country, that's a naturally destabilizing factor

You mean like the countless western "safety", copyright and "PC" changes that've come through?

I'm no fan of the CCP, but it's not as though the US isn't hamstringing it's own AI tech in a different direction. That area is something that china can exploit by simply ignoring the burden of US media copyright