None of those other services made your personal device scan for content locally and report back to the mothership

They sure did...
Marvell Completes Acquisition of Intel's Communications And Applications Processor Business - June 27, 2006
https://investor.marvell.com/news-releases/news-release-details/marvell-completes-acquisition-intels-communications-and

It's when miners get paid half as much to mine a block.

Right in the slashdot summary "a newly identified group BlackBerry researchers are tracking as WLNXSPLINTER". "newly" would imply new rather than old news.

Browser fingerprinting is quite reliable when you reject cookies. Canvas, Font, GPU, CSS API's are all good sources of identifiable data. Of course if you turn off Javascript *and* Cookies, there isn't much left to fingerprint.

is all I could think about when I saw Amazon's number

Maybe you need to get a better bank! I just logged into a top 5 Canadian bank and they are using AES-256 with a 1024-bit RSA cert.

It is that simple. Physical seperation is the way to go and since you were willing to buy a machine with your own money, you now get two machines for the price of one. No legal mess, no conversation required, this is the simplist solution.