We need to remember that this process probably started months ago before the hack. Also, remember that Equifax (while not really loved) was not really thought about as being a really bad company.
Welcome to the real world where email is unreliable. Gmail could be replaced with any service or corporation running their own email servers. Stop the spammers and email can be reliable again.
It might be. We use several apps that require Silverlight. I am sure Microsoft will update Silverlight in the future to work differently, but I can't do my work without Silverlight.
If in 2020, all those people are programmers, we are going to have some shitty software! If the people I worked with wrote software, they might fix their own itch and not think about the bigger picture nor the others in the organization.