I think the examples in the article are a bit too high level, although accurate - even more interesting when they affect grammar, like both MS Office and Grammarly leading a crusade against the passive voice.
More interesting to me though is how Microsoft Windows (not just Office) lead to the extinction of a whole punctuation point in my native Greek. The “Greek semicolon” was not included in the default Greek keyboard layout for Windows. While it remained as an option on the IBM keyboard that big organisations could choose to order, it vanished from retail and therefore from home users and the language simply lost an entire punctuation mark within a decade.
If there’s a clear example of how technology can drive language change (to the extend that writing is part of language), I feel like that’s one of the clearest examples.
Although I never used it, I am aware that Calibre can serve books in your local network. I imagine that this offers some position and annotation sync.
Unfortunately, there was never great ebook hardware. I use a tablet with Android. KOReader for ePub, constantly trying new Android PDF readers but finding nothing decent.
While not intentionally, running Syncthing between all my computers means that my PDF annotations get synced across devices. ePub ones do not; afaik KOReader uses its own metadata format that it stores as a standalone file.
Before, when I was still in university, I used Zotero also for annotation management. Feels like an overkill nowadays since I only read for leisure.