Sure, I do think that’s a reasonable difference in opinion and I agree that it’s mostly fine for someone to dislike the way that a language is changing. I think the trouble comes in when that dislike is framed as though it comes from some position of authority or superior fluency, since it’s actually an emotional argument, not a logical argument.

Your feelings about English are valid and meaningful, but only to the exact same degree that my feelings about English are valid and meaningful. Telling someone that you don’t like the way they’re speaking is often rude, but it’s not false, because you are the authority on your own feelings. Telling someone that they’re speaking incorrectly is usually “not even wrong”, because it’s framed as a logical argument but it has no logical basis.

Why is requiring more words inherently worse? Are languages that require more words to express an idea worse than other languages which require less words? For example, English has lots of prepositions whose meaning is sometimes instead encoded by verb conjugation in languages like Spanish (e.g. infinitives requiring “to” in English but not in Spanish). Does that difference make English worse than Spanish?

I don’t agree that it decreased the total expressiveness of English, no. The modern colloquial use of “literally” is not identical to “figuratively”, or to “very”, or any other word I can think of - it’s an intensifier with a unique connotation that doesn’t have any good alternative. At worst, we have lost some expressiveness and gained some expressiveness, and there is no objective metric to decide whether that’s a “net positive” or a “net negative”; it’s just a change.

You say this like it’s a fact that the word “literally” is worse now than it was before its recent evolution. You’re reducing the entire value of a word to a metric of “clarity”/“muddledness”, but natural language has value beyond its ability to be technically precise.

You’re saying that there should be such a thing as a “proper scientific conclusion” to this meme about a video game physics engine? The only definition of these portals that we have to work with is the definition in the Portal physics engine. There is no definition of anything that behaves like these portals in the scientific study of physics. It is meaningless to try to draw a scientific conclusion about something that does not have a scientific definition.