I don't miss it one bit, personally. The positives to blocking the whole instance far outweighs the negatives, imho. There are tons of other communities, and it helps make room for such things as poetry (with barely any subscribers and almost no commenters) to show up.
Ofc you do you - there may be a specific community that you feel that you cannot do without. Perhaps you can help by reposting stuff from it elsewhere.
Doubtful - Lemmy's userbase continues to shrink or at best hold steady, and while PieFed continues to keep doubling in size, its total subscriber count remains a moderate fraction of Lemmy's.
On the other hand, the tools keep getting better - excruciatingly slowly, but consistently nonetheless.
If you presume no, then imagine the same number of viruses, now infecting half the number of hosts. This seems like it would skew the balance closer towards viral survival at the expense of all living beings. Oh well.
Probably so people don't have to scroll down further to have to read through it twice (once in the image and then again in the transcript), on the way to the comments section?
It's a common idea that is put to good use here - most people don't need the transcript, but it's there if anyone does. Knowledge on demand, making it opt-in rather than forced.
If the goal were truly to avoid spoilers, then the entire post would need to be marked as such - probably by demarking it as NSFW, since many old Lemmy clients are reportedly very far behind in implementing features and that's the only one that always works (to the annoyance of many who then cannot distinguish between their NSFW content and mere spoilers, prior to clicking).
So that's an answer to your question, though if all you wanted was to express your displeasure at OP's choices, I will add that you can just say that, or block them?
You aren't fighting the trolls - you are struggling against yourself.
Someone who helps bring out the best in you is by definition not a troll, but conversely someone who brings out the worst probably is.
Watch Innuendo Studios The Alt-Right Playbook series. You will be glad that you did. It applies to tankies as well since they use identical argumentation styles. Trolls are not merely the other side, they aren't even playing at the same game as you, which is why you will be eaten alive unless you understand what's what. Like you are trying to "convince", they aren't. You use facts and references, which you actually bother reading, while they use pithy sayings. Their end goal is for you and everyone you've ever met to be killed, as Western culture ends, so that the more "pure" communism can come in - such as obviously exemplified by the likes of Russia, China, and North Korea.
They aren't trying to "convince" you - they are seeking easy prey, and trying to bully you into shutting up so that they can find others. Seriously, watch that video series if you truly want to understand. It's long, but very worthwhile.
From what I can see, that is not a back-end restructuring but as far as a new architectural design it will purely affect the front-end UI. Which will begin to look somewhat more similar to PieFed, yet without coming anywhere close to what PieFed offers today, as opposed to what PieFed offered like a year ago. e.g. there will be no ability to hold polls (or to share those custom-built feeds?).
More relevant is that Lemmy 1.0 may take a year or so to become fully deployed across the Threadiverse, if past experience is any judge. The devs say to explicitly expect major breaking bugs and perhaps to avoid deployment in prod as a result. And ofc apps are going to need to catch up as well. This one being a breaking change may lead most older apps unable to connect to an instance that uses the newer software (unless I am misreading that part about the older backwards compatible API).
Lemmy.world in particular, which holds ~50% of Threadiverse users and >90% of the most highly-active communities (unfortunately for the aim of decentralization) is well-known for delaying deployment until the Lemmy code fixes such issues.
So a year from now Lemmy will begin to catch up to some of what PieFed had almost a year ago in the past already, and meanwhile I expect PieFed will not itself be standing still all that time... I am glad to see that Lemmy is still being actively worked on, truly I am, but also I find it hard to actually be excited about that pace, by comparison. Then again, any movement forward still counts, and improves the Fediverse as a whole, so by however much, it is still a good thing! :-)
(I mean, your statement is true but also... this funny:-P)