>This is a natural consequence of democracy. By design, leaders of a country can't do something their voters don't agree with.
LOL.
That is not how bureaucracy works. Most of the key positions, that have power are not voted in. Most democraties does not vote president into his position, like it is done in US. So, it has nothing to do with democracy, but bureaucracy. And bureaucracy does not have allegiance to voters, but only to their own survival. And as long as democratic society is no threat to bureaucracy, it has no reasons to stick out and do something on their own initiative.
>>In fact your experience strikes me as another reason to actively avoid RAR;
This is only your reason.
>>there is no guarantee that your RAR archive can be decompressed with third-party softwares other than WinRAR itself.
I'm perfectly fine, that my personal files would not be opened by someone, who is actively avoiding RAR(in my personal use - after rar was lha, that I used for archiving, because no one else knew what was that). And if I am sending my files to someone, then they will sure know how to use RAR.
What others will do with THEIR PERSONAL FILES - does not concern me at all - and should not concern author of article, that heavily mixes public and personal use of archivers. If some of the points might be applicable to public use - perhaps, but it is questionable, that opinion of blog writer can have any authority on this matter, where everyone will be doing what is best for them, so the actual true value(where it is only worth to "prove" others how you are right and other are not) of this high opinionated article is ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
>>Does anyone know why RAR is better compression-wise than the two more modern standards?
Because RAR was original compression algorith(I suspect - collection of different algorithms that are applied for different cases) and those two others are based on ONE generic algorithm, which is dumb.
>>It doesn't seem like it's been updated in a long time
Because rar is perfect and what I need. I'm still using RAR files - not interested in 7z and have no idea what is the other standard mentioned. RAR has recovery record, that 7z lacks - when you have archives, that are decades old and moved from one HDD to another, where HDDs develop faults and you need to recover files - that suddently makes difference why rar is still better than 7z, when your files are corrupted in 7z - they are gone.
WINRAR License is least concern for me, because when WinRAR was created, there were different times, when there was an idea, that auhor(and maintainer) should have all the legal rights to his work(and that also includes compensation) - not some company, that is employing talents. Also idea, that your work should be free to everyone was wild idea, when software developers had to pay all the bills and eat as well. Also, closed propiertary sources were historically better for security.
RAR comes from times, when zip was dominating(and it was bad archive) - rar was better at compression than zip and it was quicker to compress and it was also supported on Linux. I have no idea what is 7z doing nowadays, but when it was developed first, it was improving zip, which nobody liked at that time. Also, 7z even nowadays havce some limitations, which requires workarounds, which is time consuming in archive creation. Anyway, none of those arguments for not using RAR seems good enough for me in especially on non open source Windows environment. The only reason for me to stop using RAR would be if Windows had access to RAR (open) source.