Yeah exactly. Using reddit as a qualifier works only until everyone starts doing it. Thankfully for now we have old.reddit.com, until they deprecate that with some bullshit excuse in PR-english (who knows what will happen after the IPO). Then there's teddit, libreddit, etc., but they only work as long as reddit doesn't make a change. Feels like everything is a cat and mouse game these days.
> they intended I solve using URL re-writes (so all result clicks run through Google rather than direct to the desired site).
Interesting, well we know how that ended with google AMP. It's good that we have people that think like you. Sadly there's always someone else willing to just take the money and implement it. I'm grateful for the community and the hobbyists that build workarounds and alternatives (e.g. searxng), and I contribute where I can. I think that's the only real solution at the moment.
Not from google but I can tell you a probable reason. I'd wager they did this purposefully, knowing that it's user-hostile. Google cache shows you what a page looks like to Google, and that often has things such as paywalls (edit - or login gates) disabled to improve indexability of the page. People could use this to get around paywalls, which is not great for profitability. Cached pages also don't show you the latest active ads.
Edit: also, easy access to non-paywalled content gives you a massive trove of training data for machine learning models. Even if these aren't the main reasons for this feature disappearing, they're pretty convenient side effects.
That word doesn't mean what you think it means. What those instructions explain is (1) removing macOS permissions, (2) removing logs/temporary files, (3) removing config. These are normal things that some may want to keep after uninstalling the program. Calling it bloatware is misleading and dilutes the meaning for things that are actually bloatware.