I think that needs a deeper investigation, please raise a support ticket.Please also mention a rough time when you saw it working the last time.

I would also recommend to use renderconditions, but instead of rolling your own rendercondition in the first place, you can use the ootb renderconditions, see https://developer.adobe.com/experience-manager/reference-materials/6-5/granite-ui/api/jcr_root/libs/granite/ui/docs/server/rendercondition.ht...

In earlier versions clientlibs were delivered via /etc/clientlibs; and that was a direct path in the repository, and the files were served directly from these locations. Suffered from a number of problems... /etc.clientlibs is a servlet bound to that path, and for that reason in /etc.clientlibs/<pro...

If you have a version of the groovy console which supports Java 21, it is likely to work. 

Are you affected by https://github.com/jhy/jsoup/issues/1616 ?

Currently the work started to allow the use of jakarta.servlet instead of javax.servlet, but I guess that it will take some time to get offically supported.

ToughDay is not relevant anymore.

The exact definition should be part of the license contract, and if it's not stated, that you should get the contract owner clarified with Adobe.(I have seen contracts which have different definitions, there is not single standard definition; mostly because customers have different requirements and ...

I assume that with image you refer to "docker images" or other cloud-native technologies which use immutable images to run containers. The images contain the entire immutable part of the AEM instance, starting with the JVM plus the immutable parts of the repository (/apps and /libs). 

There is not much difference between those, it's just that on each level of abstraction you have a way to save stuff (and you don't need to switch the abstraction layer to do it).