Don't tell anybody, but you sit on it

Some of those really are coincidences, like "Person A couldn't find their left shoe and ended up in London at a coffee house, where Person B accidentally ended up when their carriage hit a wall, which lead to them eventually coming up with Invention C" for example.

Although from what I remember from the TV show, most of what he investigates/talks about is indeed path dependence in one way or another, although not everything was like that.

That’s why I’ve put the word in parentheses :)

It blocks many more countries than just the UK because it's the lowest effort way of fighting "AI" scrapers.

imgur was created as a sort of protest against how terrible most image hosting platforms were back then, went down the drain several years later, and it's now just like they were.

It was a really clever move on Imgur's part. Their blocking the UK has nothing to do with the Online Safety Act: it's a response to potential prosecution under the Data Protection Act, for Imgur's (alleged) unlawful use of children's personal data. By blocking the UK and not clearly stating why, people assume they're taking a principled stand about a different issue entirely, so what should be a scandal is transmuted into positive press.