Sorry, I am too much of a KDE user to answer that question. In Discover you can add, remove, and order remotes via settings in the GUI. I’d assume it would be the same in Gnome Software, but I might assume wrong. If your distro does not ship it by default, you’ll need to install a plugin.

Is the author of that article clickbait garbage actually not aware of KDE Discover, Gnome Software, bauh, and likely others? It has been possible to manage flatpak remotes and packages via GUI for years …

This is victim blaming.

Only to some degree. The guy is a software engineer and should have known better. I’d agree if it was Jenny from accounting. You could just as well point out “victim blaming” when I called someone a moron for jumping from a three storey building and breaking his legs, because it was neither his intention nor was he aware that it could break his legs. For a software engineer to employ cloud based “smart” devices and then wonder if it backfires is borderline moronic.

On one side, critics lambasted Jackson as a dupe for having smart devices in the first place; […]

Yah … that.

*JetBrains. IntelliJ IDEA is their java/kotlin IDE.

It never occurred to me, that people would use calibre to read books. I only use it to move books between devices (kindle →PC ⟷ smartphone) and to strip DRM. The stripping of DRM is actually my primary motivator to use calibre.