Undertaker

I don't think, that many people use Cloudflare. Why not Quad9? There are Vetter options

Not true. Parcels can be delievered to DHL shop where you can pay with several methods (I already did so). Yet the fee is indeed annoying when comparing with the 3 € cause

Digital Markets Act

For those looking to switch, BlueSky (bsky.app) [...] good options.

Hell no. Wtf. Don't be as stupid as the german politicians moving from one problem to the next one. Use Mastodon.

Stick to tge criticism. The user is right

It fits into the whole philosophy. There are several posts ( Initial Kuketz, discussion on Kuketz critique, reminder/restart discussion, criticism on usage of OpenAI in /e/ and poor communication, same questions again with no or wrong answers) criticising /e/ for heavily ignoring privacy and security flaws and only one response post on this Duvals answer on OpenAI usage in which they clarify to see 'emotional' reactions and look for alternatives while still finding it acceptable and criticism is 'FUD' and 'hurt of reputation' instead of valid concern.

Additionaly the points postet by Kuketz are not addressed since today. Updates are a bit faster but still with weeks delay and still not including several parts of security updates (instead it's the bare minimum).

I looked for several posts on social media and Duval always ignores the points and yells that all the people are only up to harass him. He also uses false arguments to convince (probably) himself of this ridiculous behaviour.

I started using /e/ in summer 2022 and was positive and hopeful because of the idea (long updates, privacy in mind, degoogled). But over the years learning that nearly all internal community and external expert criticism was ignored or marked as irrelevant or harassment when it's not, my opinion changed and I'm no longer willing to talk or write about /e/ diplomatically as it is inappropriate.

if this is true

It's not. Can be closed

Had the same problem. Contacted the admin who said that I was blocked due to many requests. The problem: They block critical queries sending something like 0.0.0.0 or 127.0.0.1. So the problematic connection cannot be established. That is the intended behavior. But the problematic will keep retrying and therefore you get blocked. When having startet my companies notebook (I got blocked) due to many Windows requests. Don't know why but the treshold is not high enough

...are there any unofficial WhatsApp clients I can use to preserve my privacy?

Using WhatsApp and 'preserve privacy' is a contradiction. Accept no privacy or stop using any kind of Metas services and networks

It was promised that it will never happen. Don't know why you thought unrealistic thingd

UltraVision fully respects your privacy

Furthermore, any info you personally insert into the app, such as your name and email address, is stored on US-based servers

Lol, immediate contradiction.

Answer to your question: Only local/offline is privacy respecting. Anything else is naif