I call this fake news, browsers have had the ability to scale vertically and horizontally for ages and obviously TDB fully supports it as well. It even boasts experimental support for multi monitor setup (although some glitches are to be expected)
I sincerely doubt that had any real implication. Transport was quite bad those days and dragging them across 50 states would be quite taxing on a horse. The law changed accordingly as the situation evolved
Slight nit - they used to say "on Ukraine" (на Украине) as in /on Ukrainian land/. In contrast to the term "in" - "in Ukraine" - which is something you would use to reference an entity, for ex. a country.
Not to deter from the point but DDG also returns Google Earth as a first result of the search for Earth. The algorithms can be (and are) manipulated; it's called SEO. Fun example is an image search
of "white couple".