Yes no one cares, but then a big company announces they will not serve people in animal costumes. Then people go - makes sense, it’s weird anyway. I’ve never seen a person in animal costume in person, not even as a mascot or on a kid’s birthday. It’s just not a thing here. And I’m from Serbia, it’s provably even rarer in Moldova. I would find it weird if someone explicitly said they will deny them service. It’s like denying service to dinosaurs, it’s odd. It is a good cheap marketing though.
Yes, com ports work way better than in windows. I’ve done a lot of embedded development on linux and it’s way more pleasant than in windows. One thing you do have to keep in mind is that access to com ports (USB and real) requires root access by default, but once you’ve set the udev rule up, it becomes accesible to normal users and/or group of users. After that, it works flawlessly. Android dev also works great and imo better than on win. Proprietary jtags may be an issue, but I’ve never actually had an unsolvable situation.