And in 2026, I don't think it's too big of a stretch to imagine that there are going to be people in power that can add + remove the metadata to whatever image they want, at will, to tell whatever story they want to create. Sadly.

There were similar fears about the webtrust CA system, but AFAIK there's no known incidents where a government strongarmed a CA into misissuing a MITM certificate, and then it was used in MITM attacks. The closest is some misissued certificates seemingly due to incompetence but weren't used in attacks.