Epstein's lawyers and his realtor, his tailor and his golf partners also associated with him but they don't appear at all to be desirable targets to debase with the same treatment and that's probably because they aren't rich or powerful or influential. And I'm certain that's what's tripping you. It's not just OK but maybe even preferential and encouraged by you to take a dump on certain people when a tiny vague chance presents itself only because the person is powerful.

I found this earlier comment from you on this topic which is a bit funny given your statement. To me youre kinda describing yourself.

  HN is pretty divided about Stallman. Bringing up the things he actually at one
  time said, even if later he said something different, results in a lot of
  downvoting and toxicity. You can't talk about him without it devolving into
  binary thinking and binary debates. Same as everything else in 2023 I guess.

Roughly one hour after I e-mailed @elithrar who kindly reached out and offered to expediate the issue, the broken DNSSEC records were partly fixed. The domain once again resolved through all major DNSes, and public access was restored. At that point dnsviz.net told me that A, MX, etc. records were "insecure", though name resolution worked fine. A few minutes ago I took another look with dnsviz and it's now telling me that all records are secure. Everything looks normal again.

Thanks a bunch for helping out, @elithrar. I really appreciate that you were proactive.

If the problem had somehow fixed itself or if the support ticket had gotten any attention or feedback at all within a day or two instead of just being "snoozed" by support staff, I wouldn't have made any noise about it. After four days of complete silence a bit of "cry-baby consumer activism" seemed like the only resort.

If CF reconnects to me with an update on why the domain dead-locked and why it took 4 days to untilt everything I'll add that info as well.

I've been OP and this has been an update about my domain woes.

Source: me, having lost access to my domain for 4 days for reasons that are not yet fully clear to me.

Cloudflare's kind policy of zero markup on domain registrations on a free plan is remarkably generous. OK, sure, the traffic data has an obvious value to them, but maybe the support environment could improve with, I dunno, a tiny 5% markup.

There is by users' own hands no way out of domain registration issues like these, sooner than 30-45 days when the domain can be transferred once again. Those who decide to offer registrar services, even for free, must hold some liability towards the users and the ecosystem and offer some support to make sure their product actually works.