There’s a point in that process where you stop caring if you permanently damage things.
I had a bike where the stem of the seat was somehow permanently welded into the tube. Nothing I did worked. I took it to a bike shop and they said there was nothing they could do without damaging the bike. At some point I just gave up and was willing to sacrifice the bike’s frame just to get those two metal parts apart.










My guess is that 90% of the growth in browser bloat is to support bloated websites.
These days websites can be games, drawing applications, video players, etc. As a result, browsers have basically become operating systems. In addition, the browsers try to support even the most horribly written websites, but that means more bloat in the browser. Meanwhile faster computers mean that people developing websites are just doing more and more javascript, more and more animation, more and more mouse tracking, etc.
If you have an old device with an old browser, a lot of modern websites are completely unusable. I have an old iPad that’s too old to update, and it’s not actually possible to use browse Github anymore. It just ends up with javascript elements on the page that never finish loading. And Github isn’t some site thrown together by someone vibe-coding their first website or something.