I loved the India/China border sub-plot, both as a fun story and as a metaphor for geopolitics.
At the end of the book no faction of elites is clearly winning, they're just hashing out The Line Of Actual Control.
I've heard him say that REAMDE was his attempt to write an airport paperback. I don't think he succeeded there, but Termination Shock does work as a light thriller so maybe he was taking a second swing.
I think the moon theory was almost right, but I didn't see any reference to insects keeping the light source to one side or the other. The researchers seem to think that insects orient as if the brightest thing they see is "up".
When I worked in an office it was much easier to casually ask for quick help. It was often pretty obvious whether a senior engineer was busy and focused or between tasks, checking email etc. and the overhead/friction of these ten-second conversations is higher when you have to wait for a response on slack, then launch a video call, share screen... instead of just making eye contact and saying "got a sec?"