fme, it's only kind of inconvenient. By the time the scene gets to the point where join-in-progress is disabled it's complete chaos anyway. Might as well restart the scene.
That said I haven't played any of the more intricate mods out there, but I can how it would become more of an issue.
Yep, close to regular browser tabs from my point of view. I don't know all the shortcuts, but the few that I used - CTRL+{T,W} - behaved like Chrome or Firefox.
If you want to fly around galaxies and feel insignificant, Space Engine is pretty good for that. It's not a true simulation, as most things are procedurally generated unless an addon is installed, but it certainly captures the scale of things.
I'm guessing they already had the plug (I myself have a small stockpile of extra Z-wave/wifi/Zigbee devices for when I inevitably need/want to hook something up), so there wasn't a need to buy something else.
Just guessing here, but I think the vertical scaling might be for translating some of the top-down images they have. If you take a look at the photo below, Pluto appears to have pretty rough terrain. I didn't find anything about post-processing for this particular image, sorry in advance if I missed it.
Whitespace is important for a myriad of reasons, so the implementation makes sense to me. However, I would love to see git have configuration surrounding syntax awareness. That's a huge undertaking, though, but one can dream.
I think emojis are easily overused, but I certainly don't mind when they're used to convey simple, universally understood meaning (such as reacting with a "me too" in a bug report).
Stuff like gitmoji, though, drive me nuts. Talk about ambiguous and easily misused. Faster for everyone if you just say what you mean.
I've made it through about 75% of the book and have never gotten the sense that they think everything discussed in the book is something you should always do. Each pattern discussed has a summary of pros and cons. While they may be a bit lacking, they clearly articulate the fact that you should be thinking whether or not the pattern matches the application's needs.
I don't think there's many applications that will require everything in the book but there are certaintly many applications that could apply one or more patterns discussed.
That said I haven't played any of the more intricate mods out there, but I can how it would become more of an issue.