The article says that the research showed that energy transferred to the ball was basically the same — although it also says that a batter couldn’t feel the difference, which can’t be true given the angular momentum difference. But as a casual watcher of the game, it seems like there’s sufficient energy in the game right now that even a reduction of energy would be a good trade if the bat has a larger sweet spot, or puts it in a more usable place, no?

There's still at least one relevant big-endian-only ARM chip out there, the TI Hercules. While in the past five or ten years we've gone from having very few options for lockstep microcontrollers (with the Hercules being a very compelling option) to being spoiled for choice, the Hercules is still a good fit for some applications, and is a pretty solid chip.

I can’t speak to the C++ contract design — it’s possible bad choices were made. But contracts in general are absolutely exactly what C++ needs for the next step of its evolution. Programming languages used for correct-by-design software (Ada, C++, Rust) need to enable deep integration with proof assistants to allow showing arbitrary properties statically instead of via testing, and contracts are /the/ key part of that — see e.g. Ada Spark.