My mistake, I looked at the article for 10 seconds before assuming that this app is no different than hundreds of other ones, apparently it is a rare outlier. At any rate, there are more effective ways to disrupt service if that was the goal.
Surprised to see this guy wasn't already in prison due to his previous antics, and it's too bad he didn't responsibly report this issue through the proper channels. Everyone's luck is bound to run out at some point.
I think most people here are vastly, vastly overestimating the size of the videos with all this talk about buffering in the comments.
The average video on tiktok, at least for the webapp version, appears to be around 1 megabit (0.125 megabytes) per second when the h264 option is used, and only half of that rate when using ByteDance's 'own' (essentially hevc) format.
I would reckon nearly all internet users, even many mobile ones, have more than enough bandwidth (and low enough latency and loss) to stream many of these tiktok videos in real time simultaneously, let alone a single one at a time.
Tiktok's backend infrastructure may be impressive, but the same could be said for the other companies you listed such as Google.
Apple's most basic multitouch trackpad (the one from 10+ years ago, prior to the haptic stuff, prior to the force touch stuff, prior to the massive dimensions) runs absolute circles around every other laptop pointing device to date, to the point where it's not even funny. Its only weak point is the 125hz sample rate.
The big downside of the trackpoint is that it's more of a joystick replacement than a mouse replacement; more waiting around is required to get the cursor positioned where you want it, even with acceleration.
It was very surprising to see how many people were buying into this (frankly awful) idea when it was posted here a year or two ago. Any one person criticizing it was immediately dogpiled on by 10 people telling them how wrong they were. Refreshing to see everything come full circle in the end.
From a purely anecdotal perspective, I've noticed a vast decrease in the performance of the macOS updaters/installers since the point when they switched to using what is essentially the iOS mechanism for them, with the MobileAsset UpdateBrain stuff, and .ipsw files, and chunked pbzx archives nested inside zip archives nested inside xar archives. I don't remember the details of the previous system, but I remember it seeming a lot simpler, a lot less buggy, and certainly a lot faster on my hardware.
Not sure why people flagged you for this. It's very common for open source projects to make the details of security-related bugs private. One example is Firefox, nearly every security update references one or more bug tickets that the public doesn't have permission to view.
I wonder if Apple listed the wrong webkit bug number, it almost looks like it.