Reasonable suspicion. Empirically false, in my case.

Strongly upvoted. Great post. I disagree with most of it and would love to read more like it.

What are you trying to say here? Okay, just write that.

Literally /part of every editing session with my boss, my first two years out of grad school.

This is also a good example of something I am seeing as a general trend. In my personal experience, most visible in groceries, rising costs of things like labor and logistics relative to materials create a kind of compression that decreases the proportional cost premium of choosing higher quality. There's always ways to spend more, and usually ways to find low or average quality cheaper. But I feel like this depends more and more on where and when you shop, rather than the quality of what you buy. I have no hard data at all about this, its just perception.

This is true. I think the for OP (and definitely for me) it feels obvious enough that that 'shouldn't' be necessary, but I agree it is. Once you start noticing it, you see it everywhere. But that only happens if you are one of the people who reads the original work.

One of the simpler, though fictional, classic examples is The Road Not Taken, which is very very short, yet even Frost himself complained about how people were misunderstanding it. And even people who do read it seem to keep misunderstanding it. Many people seem to completely gloss over the sentence structures and small-but-critical words in what they read, and end up parsing it incorrectly. Ditto for Mending Wall. I find literary examples useful because they're less technical (and therefore more accessible) and very easy to confirm.

One example I like is that Einstein wanted to call the theory of relativity the 'theory of invariants.' He understood that what matters, as a deep principle of physics, is which quantities and laws are truly fixed. Yes, he showed that some important things people had thought were invariant weren't, but what mattered were the things that were invariant that people hadn't realized. Instead even physics teachers talk about 'paradoxes' and end up confusing a lot of hapless undergrads, a century later.

To tell a story, suppose you're the CTO and you have a new engineering manager underneath you who is a mix of incompetent and vindictive.  This manager won't inform you of the personnel issue here, and the reports unlikely to reach out if the CTO feels inaccessible and the manager is vindictive. It could perhaps be surfaced with skip-level 1-1s. This can happen if the CTO manages two middle managers. What if there are six?

Conversely: This also has implications for how many direct reports the middle manager probably has. If I have skip-level 1 on 1 meetings, or some other upward review process, my response potentially looks very different depending on whether I'm one of 2 or 6 direct reports. 6, and there's a lot of people saying a lot of things, I'm part of a crowd and can be fairly open and honest. 2, and it's much harder for me to trust that my boss won't know who said what about them, if there's anything that needs to be said that might incur retaliation. 

Otherwise, overall agreed with most of this. Many companies and groups scale too quickly because they think it's what they're supposed to do, for many reasons. Some others really should scale but can't or won't.

That's true. For air and surface cleaning the smell is much weaker because the total amounts are much smaller. And it fades very quickly, because it decomposes to saline as it dries. You can safely disinfect a room with people still in it. In some places, businesses do so a few times a day. It can be used as a laundry additive, too. The effect on mammalian cells isn't zero, but it is much lower than for bacterial, viral, and fungal cells. It's one of the compounds your body produces internally as a nonspecific antimicrobial.

Is there a reason why hypochlorous acid fogging isn't part of the conversation as well? Either alone or in combination with UVC. It's very safe at relevant concentrations, and can sterilize a room in minutes using water, electricity, salt, and vinegar. 

At a sufficient level of abstraction, the fundamental principles of strategy are approximately substrate-independent, I think. They are formless. Void.

what if your enemy also knows themselves and knows you?

IDK what Sun Tzu would say to this, but I would say, 

1. No one in practice has actually perfect knowledge, so one side would still have more than the other, and
2. The quote does not say you will win every battle. It says you need not fear the result. It might be that you know the result will be that you will lose, and therefore you should either avoid the battle or surrender from the start. To paraphrase another well-known leader with a challenging strategic situation: If you know you will win, there is no need to fear. If you know you will lose, it's of no use to fear.

California’s Attorney General will be hiring an AI expert.

The linked article headline says they're hiring an AI 'expert.' IDK what they're planning on paying this person, but I doubt it's enough to hire an expert. An 'expert' seems like exactly what they'll get.