I thought tictok was very unsafe to use. Is that narrative old news and just fear mongering now?

They can't really gather that much data other than what you're interested in. It pretty much just stores data on what videos you watched and comments etc.

imo it doesn't really matter if you use american companies stuff who have to give your data to various three letter agencies or some chinese app that will give it to the chinese government (which can't really do anything with it anyways)

The blog post is basically a word for word "rip off" of the book The Power of Habit.

An author posting a labeled excerpt from their own book on their own website isn't ripping anyone off.