I mean most things are implemented as plugins, so you can just disable the ones with features you consider bloat.

What do you do on your machine that requires you to completely disable a fundamental security feature of your distro? I haven't had SELinux cause any issues for years.

That seems like a shortcoming in those tools, that I'd expect them to fix as Flatpaks are pretty commonplace.

Please elaborate.

It uses FCM for the notifications.

Do you have a source for the claim that collecting userdata is ultimately what funds Matrix?

Does this support DRM protected streams, for example with Widevine? Whether one likes DRM or not, it is clear that support for it is a hard requirement for any streaming apps to support this.

Won't most of those pieces of software work on xwayland?

I generally call democratic countries "countries" and I occasionally call undemocratic countries "regimes".

Yes, most (all?) Western countries are democracies. Yes, China is not a democracy. What is your point?

I guess that depends on which power your agenda aligns with. That power is generally a safe choice, compared to services from a power where your agenda is orthogonal.

For the multiplexing, as I mentioned.

A V4L2 camera can only be opened by a single application at a time, but if that application is Pipewire, then Pipewire can allow multiple applications to make use of it simultaneously. Same thing with ALSA, it's the reason sound servers exist at all, though I suspect you're already familiar with that.

I also hear that ALSA has some support for multiple applications per device nowadays, though I understand it is much less pleasant to use than a fully featured sound server.

Because it is convenient for programs to use Pipewire for screensharing, as those programs can then also use the same Pipewire support for all their audio and webcam needs. Also Pipewire is good at multiplexing the various media streams.