I disagree with your disagreement, for example HN is readable but the linked site feels too small for my eyes on a 21.5" 1080p monitor. It also doesn't respect browser preferences, unless you enforce a minimum font size (which can break display elements on other sites):

  font-family: Calibri, Candara, Segoe UI, Optima, Arial, sans-serif;
  font-size: 13px;

If the dev wanted a similar effect by default but be more accommodating, they could do:

  font-family: Calibri, Candara, Segoe UI, Optima, Arial, sans-serif;
  font-size: 0.8125rem;

There's no reason why you couldn't have smaller font while still respecting browser scaling. However, they might also want to just leave it at 1 rem and let the folks that prefer higher information density to customize their own browser settings, since those are what most well developed sites should respect and it might be more accessible by default on most devices (for my eyes, at the very least).

As for targeting specific screen sizes for non-standard font scaling, media queries also would help!

In regards to missing information dense pages, try changing your browser font settings, it might actually be quite pleasant for you to see many sites respecting that preference!

I agree that too many sites now will narrow the text area and pad too much. The issue here is a fixed pixel size that will look quite different depending on the specific monitor setup you have.

And honestly if this type of thing bothers you as much as it does me, unfortunately it means adding a bunch of stylus sheets everywhere...

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I think they are referring to the occurrence rate of false positives, not that of false negatives. E.g. the page for California lists back through to the Bond Fire, which was contained in 2020. The problem may stem from the FEMA page list the incident day as a single day https://www.fema.gov/disaster/5385 so this tool doesn't set and end date like it would for https://www.fema.gov/disaster/5382

A similar kind of false positive note could probably be made of the "Recent Earthquakes" section. E.g. if you select Indianapolis, IN it includes all the way down to a M2.6 which occurred in NW Tennessee 30 days ago.

The complete web page and all resources are saved locally by the service worker. "Clear site data"/clear cookies will delete it. However, clearing the normal browser cache won't. It's overall a little more persistent than the cache for static resources. Chrome can also install it as an app on e.g. Android, Linux, and Windows.