I imagine you could find a lot of options. Just a quick google turned up ThinStation, which only needs 30-50MB if storage and 64MB+ of RAM. A bit outdated, but should work fine.
You could also make your own OS with LFS if you want to optimize it to the extreme.
Chrome is actually doing a lot of work to display modern webpages though. A thin client only needs to receive a video stream and send inputs to a server. That can be done with an extremely low memory footprint. The Steam Link only had 512MB of RAM and it actually ran a steam client (which contains embedded chromium) instead of acting as a pure thin client.
The Spanish or Vanish ad is terrifying. I don't know how the marketing team got permission to have "I love the taste of human flesh" in Spanish as one of the lyrics in the song.
Not necessarily. I found out that bitwarden can generate a QR code that you just scan with your phone that allows your phone to act as a passkey, no browser support required. I was surprised when I discovered that. I had set up my phone as a passkey in Windows, and Windows can use phones as a passkey directly; on Linux that's not supported so it just gave me a QR code that worked seamlessly. It's not like a browser URL, but actually triggers the phone's passkey authentication, kinda like QR codes for WiFi authentication. Pretty neat.
To be fair, the backdoor only gets enabled when built as an RPM or Deb package, which doesn't apply to Arch Linux, and also requires openSSH to be linked to liblzma, which is also not the case on Arch. So from what we know so far, the Arch packages should not have had the vulnerability. The risk now is whether there are other vulnerabilities or backdoors that haven't been discovered which is why Arch made the update building directly from the git source instead of the known modified source tarball.
We also need support for the new protocol in Nvidia's driver. Support will be available in driver 555, the beta of which will be released on May 15. So there's still some time to wait until it's fully fixed.
The Nvidia driver on Wayland has been decent for a couple of years and stabilized a lot over the past ~6 months. The flickering issue was specific to XWayland. Normal Wayland apps don't have flickering problems (not quite sure why tbh), but XWayland apps would often rapidly flicker between 2 frames since it only supported implicit sync, which confused the Nvidia driver, which only supports explicit sync. Now with a Wayland protocol for explicit sync, XWayland can be updated to support it and resolve the flickering there.
Context is important though. The reason that the US is now such a huge fuel exporter is because of oil crises in the past. The government realized how dependent the US is on oil and handed out huge subsidies and land grants to produce its own oil and not be dependent on other, not so friendly countries. The side effect of all that production is now huge corporate profit from the excess production.
I imagine they'll eventually work around block rules with DNS over https.