

You’re not missing something, a lot of this is FUD, Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt. Same as the Intel ME conspiracy theories which largely lose all their bite when given even the least bit of scrutiny. It’s one of those things to make people afraid for attention and clicks but ultimately contains a lot of vague points, and possibly even misinformation. If you feel worried just install the placeholder, but a lot of what’s shared in the article about bypassing permissions when it’s not even a system app is FUD and ultimately misinformation, since as pointed out it isn’t a system app and has no permissions declared.
Maybe recursive DNS will become much more popular. I’d love to see faith and compliance with ICANN and IANA erode at least a little bit. Centralized DNS is the Achilles heel of the open internet, and yes that extends to activitypub based platforms which federate via domains.