Kind of a bad example, because mankind very clearly stems from ‘humankind’. And people are lazy and prefer using short words. The unfairness is rather that women got stuck with the words requiring more characters. But that is a phenomenon of the English language and not present in others.
However, in most languages the words for man/male are closer to human(kind) than female/woman, which very clearly shows the historic patriarchal influence, coming back around to your point after all.
What’s your source on the reverify thing? I use matrix a lot, and this hasn’t been an issue I ever experienced anymore since they introduced cross-signing a couple years ago.
Same goes for the common clients such as element. It has been clunky in the past, but after the past major overhauls ( also years ago now) everything has been silky smooth for me, if not better than others. The one thing left I prefer from Signal is the one-time photo share.
Matrix is great, clients are great too, only the server part still is annoyingly complicated and messy. Would only recommend that for tinkerers, on that case it’s a great path to learning about the complexity of addressing lots of security concerns that others gloss over.
Edit: to add - there’s a reason why the French government and the German military decided to build their secure internal IM infrastructure on Matrix. Obviously they are hosting their own private network, but if the concept is good enough for European government and military, it is an indicator for quality especially in terms of security and privacy.