which have been disabled about a month ago

Good to hear. I had to filter out all the @alien.top threads at some point after I accidently replied to one thread here instead of reddit and my reply was not seen by the author requesting help.

Maybe. Maybe not. A number of posts (@alien.top) are just re-posting reddit.

Instead is there a good way to font lock these commas so that they are barely visible?

You can add a custom font-lock-keyword.

This kind of thing can be done as long as you can set toolbar text from a script. That script can either query emacsclient or you can arrange clock-in/out hooks to update some text file.

Either set org-use-sub-superscripts to '{} globally or put #+options: ^:{} per document. Be aware that both the options take effect after after reload.

Entity syntax involves backslash. As an alternative, you may define a custom export filter + custom font-lock keyword.

Could it be that setq cursor-type is not respected by org-mode?

Org mode does not change cursor type in Org buffers. I recommend checking your hooks.