Sort of. As the saying goes: the dose makes the poison. The article itself presents a quote stating that the low level of lead exposure caused by TEL in gasoline was thought to be safe at the time.
Connection establishment in bittorrent might be marginally higher overhead than HTTP, but not by much and the cost is highly amortized if you're doing many range requests in the same torrent. There is indeed more overhead from HAVE messages and such, but that's just because bittorrent is doing a lot more than HTTP to enable P2P. It's still not that bad as a percentage of the payload traffic.
Bittorrent can do random access just fine, especially with v2 which enables content verification in 16KB chunks. Clients tend to be throughput oriented which leads to sub-optimal latency, but that's not a limitation of the protocol.
Not by a long shot either. The current stable version of Chrome (72) came with 58 security fixes, including a dozen UAFs, albeit several of those are in third party dependencies.
Pascal was indeed a big jump in efficiency, but that by itself doesn't really reflect the longer term trend. Prior to Pascal efficiency had stalled for a couple of years as GPUs were stuck on a 28nm process for much longer than previous node sizes. This pattern is likely to continue as advancements in fabrication continue to slow down and architectural gains become smaller.