Ah, I added a comment to one of the other linked bugs, so that might speed things up a bit.

The bug I opened is T373556: Document wgCollectionDisableDownloadSection and fix the UI if this is false. and the patch in gerrit is here

I can apply for Developer access if you need me to push the patch into the Collection extension. I'm not too familiar with Gerrit's Code review system, so if one ofyou could push it that would be great!

Also noticed that it complained about an un-initiated variable on one of the pages in debug mode, so the following patch fixes that.

As someone who is actively using the bookcreator download functionality, please don't entirely remove this section. See my bug and patch for a better way of dealing with this.

I entirely agree that nobody should start using this software, but I would bet I'm not the only person that has it on an older mediawiki, with a working render server, and upgrade their mediawiki install and find there's a bunch of warnings that tell you that something doesn't work anymore, when it actually does, if you look through the code and set an undocumented variable.

Hmm, my screenshots didn't upload properly. Please let me know if you need me to re-upload them. It should be fairly obvious what I'm referring to if you just add `$wgCollectionMWServeURL = false and $wgCollectionMWServeURL = "http://localhost:8899";`to your LocalSettings.php