Here is what I dictate: this is fucking stupid and I'm tired of seeing this nonsense parroted.
Working on your own engine gives you a level of understanding that cannot otherwise be obtained. It's like writing your own OS. This is very much a worthwhile endeavour. People should be encouraged to write their own crap, even if they don't end up using it on the job or whatever (whoever the fuck said this was the only metric for deciding what to work on?) because of the level of insight it provides.
Generic engines like UE5 and Unity break down both in terms of functionality and performance the moment you do something they are not intended to do. They are also an overkill for a project of the scale shared here. From an engineering perspective, it's absolutely ridiculous to use an engine for this project.
So please stop parroting this nonsense. Use your goddamn brain to form opinions. There isn't an off-the-shelf engine for that.
Good point against the EEE case above, but the models are not open source per the OSI definition that everyone understands. That part is part of their marketing playbook. Licenses are almost always non-commercial use, which makes them not-open. You could say it's "open model", but that's a useless term since the arch is not a secret, but rather the training data that went into it, which is not open.
These are records from 2022. The hack wasn't carried out the second the calls were made. You really need to keep the records that long to do your billing? That's absurd.
'Deeply suspicious' is an understatement. These corporations don't have your back, and if something benefits the user, it's only as a side effect. Sadly, many still buy into the messaging, which must be hard to avoid when Apple's marketing has always been around making you feel like the kool kid in the block. Anybody who has ever believed Apple's pro-privacy scam is living in a fairy tale.