(I haven’t read the story, could be missing something)
Pretty prose, but I am confused as to why you didn’t mention how some beauty features have become somewhat uncoupled from fertily health due to make up, surgeries etc. This would only increase with better tech to the point where it would only very slightly correlate. Seems an important piece of the puzzle along with the fact that most of our drives are monotonic and not very intelligent, breast size being a prime example. So when you consider a society of calliagnosics inventing some compensating technology—I would expext this to be better in terms of health/fertility outcomes for society than the equivalent-tech world where people care about beauty due to the calliagnosic society optimising specifically for those things rather than a correlate.
with respect to caffeine content of coffee pods: Was able to find this (paywalled) study https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0260106018810941#core-collateral-purchase-access
Their method of analysis seems sound, and they find considerable variability across at least this brand of coffee pods. Caffeine content of resulting coffee varied with serving size on the order of 10-20 mg, max-min varied by 40 or 30 mg though for this I’m pretty sure they considered all 4 measurements for a given type of pod (2 measurements for small size and 2 for large), which is not a lot, so the data is pretty noisy, but it’s enough to see that the caffeine content on the packaging is not to be trusted (unless your brand of coffee pods uses some weird process that doesnt involve caffeine coming from the beans themselves).
Also a note for their comparisons to manufacturer contents—they compare the All means to listed content, which is weird since people probably consume one of the coffee serving sizes, not both, so it’s understating the difference from listed contents.