Well, the biggest comparison I can draw is Excel and it does not have this visual limitation. Make it a toggle if people prefer, but sometimes a column is wider than your screen width, which renders the sheet unusable.
Everything gets used by bad actors. Internet, cars, roads, kitchen knives, bicycles, hoodies, ... You still use these because they're handy and useful. If criminal acitivity means to not use things, we'd use very little. I wouldn't think too much about it.
I thought it was the influx of new posters who don't take the time to transcribe their images, a growth in users that surpasses the transcribers. I guess this chart says otherwise and the transcribing users may indeed have dwindled.
Fediverse is changing. People used to put the text of images, like comics, in the body of the OP to be more accessible, but I haven't seen that in ages. It's something I noticed.
They might write to faster storage first, then dump to slower larger storage afterwards