Not everything needs to be a soulslike.
Bimfred
"Respect" is commonly used in two wildly different ways. To some, it means being treated as an authority. To others, it means being treated as a person (aka common fucking courtesy). Then there's the absolute shitstains who say "If you won't respect me, then I won't respect you," and what they mean is "If you won't treat me as an authority, I won't treat you as a person."
Being treated as a person is given. Being treated as an authority is earned. And if you don't do anything to prove you're capable of being an authority, you don't deserve to be treated as such.
That they also won't use on R&D. Or healthcare. Or housing. Or feeding people. Those things aren't shit for a lack of resources to fund them, they're shit for a lack of interest in funding them. That's not a problem you can fix with more money.
Governments HAVE the resources. They CHOOSE to not spend it on R&D.
Three years? A low energy transfer orbit gets you to Mars in less than a year. In the past, theoretical crewed missions were planned with an 8-9 month travel time. With enough propellant, could get that down to just over three months. And that's with chemical rockets, not some hypothetical nuclear or torch drive.
Less self-aware? They had a shot that just said "VFX: Car on fire" in the first few minutes of the movie.
What power do you have when there's no one to subject to it?
ISS's radiators. It's processing data on the station that would otherwise be transmitted groundside and processed here.
They get to claim it because we let them. Every time an article comes out with "____ is a Nazi dogwhistle," there's a set of people who don't want to be associated with Nazis (or insert relevant disliked group of choice) who will immediately drop whatever the thing is. This creates a cycle where something does eventually become a dogwhistle, because everyone who didn't use it as such has stopped using it altogether.
TL;DR: Fuck 'em. Don't let those assholes control how you express yourself.

So install the mod and set your difficulty where you like it, while the rest of us don't need to deal with any of that git gud shit.
I have nothing against mods like that existing. I'm very much against having an official DLC that enforces it as the new default, which was the implication of your first post.