Then Linus responded pretty poorly (and ended up stepping down as CEO and is now a chief creative something or other iirc)

Linus didn’t step down in response to this. I don’t remember the exact timelines, but he either stepped down before this, or was in already in the process of transitioning to the new CEO when this happened.

It’s been a while since I took statistics, but yes, I guess that is a binomial distribution. It does not influence the results in the way you are implying it does, though. The calculator does actually account for it (the Population Proportion input), and the sample size actually decreases the lower/higher your proportion is. My point was that a question like, “Do you watch anime weekly,” is not like a question like, “How many hours of anime do you watch in a week,” where you certainly couldn’t assume a normal distribution for the number of hours watched.

Normal distribution with regards to what? “Do you watch anime weekly” is a binary question. There really isn’t a distribution associated with that.

You don’t need a massive sample size for surveys to give meaningful information. Play around with this sample size calculator if you want to see what the margins of error are: https://www.calculator.net/sample-size-calculator.html?type=2&cl2=95&ss2=4000&pc2=5&ps2=500000000&x=Calculate