Vandalism amounts shouldn't increase much, this is just automating a system that stewards have been manually doing for a while. I know this because it's how I first started editing Wikipedia.

Wikitech (which I'm pretty sure is WMCS) links "Privacy Policy" to the WMF privacy policy.

The gateway would be the best in avoiding law enforcement. For the money transfer method, we could find a generic international money-transferring service that doesn't display the company name in the transaction name.

Alright, so I take it you meant Chinese open proxies? That would be quite a task and indeed something we need to consider

block open proxies

Plus, I'm not sure what your concern with automatically granting IPBE to mainlanders is. They physically cannot edit without it and there are existing measures against disruptive edits. There is 1 billion people in China and this would bring a great influx of these intelligent enough to use a VPN

There are several other proposals for verifying that the user is in mainland China:

Beat me to it by 7 minutes.

Workaround: for now you can zoom in until the language selector disappears. Now he log in and create account buttons will show up inside the ellipsis.

To streamline the process you might want to catch up on reading on what are subtasks, what are bugs, and what are feature requests. IMO that was the only reason you were scrutinized. If you submitted this as a feature request from the start then the issue wouldn't ever be closed. It's pretty standard protocol that "bug" tasks working as intended are closed.

I mean if there’s any updates, it’s been a couple months.

I'm pretty new, is there any progress on this?

I'm drawing a blank, how can this be tested?

Maybe we could reintroduce 0645AD, the old wikilink color, for emphasized links. But I think we should make the change by moving the log in button to the first level first, and think about emphasis after that.