If you wash away the salt deposits, that implies using water and thus generating brine. Brushing the salt away might be better. Main thing would be avoiding losing the salt to precipitation, as the idea seems to be to avoid it returning to the ocean.
Figuring out how to economically purify the salts, including separating out the lithium, would be a neat trick.

I remember reading about the fight between polished aluminum planes and painted. The paint adds weight, and thus increases fuel consumption, but the paint lowers maintenance costs.
A dirty airplane can absolutely burn a noticeably larger amount of fuel.
A car is operating at much lower speeds, generally, so the effect is probably much less.

I'm surprised at appealing. That will likely cost more than the fine.
Still, not wanting the precedent is a thing.

NASA contracts out missions, they don't really do missions in-house. SpaceX is currently winning the launch and visit ISS missions by a mile. Competition like Boeing is more expensive and less reliable.

$500 hammer was actually a set of hammer, shovel, and pick. It had to be non-magnetic, non-sparking, yet durable enough for work. Intended use was for digging out old unstable explosives that the government had let sit around for far too long after WWII.

Pencil that could write in space - standard pencils use graphite, and shed graphite dust when used. Graphite is carbon, it is both conductive and flammable as a powder. Can one see why that might be bad in zero g constrained atmospheres?
The Fisher space pen was developed by Fisher, on his dime, and subsequently sold to both space agencies, US and Russia.

The USA is not "literally Russia". There might be the occasional commonality, but the problems Russia faces are far more severe and deeply run.

I remember a time when any stupid idea that you could put ".com" on would get shit tons of investor money. The only thing it produced mostly was bankruptcies and the opportunity for small companies to buy needed equipment for pennies on the dollar. This AI craziness strikes me the same way. AI can be useful but it'll never be the "be all things", they rarely to live up to the hype. I've seen it too many times, the dotcom boom-bust, nano-technology, Ruby on rails; anyway COBOL had a good run.

So do you or do you not understand that allowing tons of obscure code to be loaded dynamically (hint: modules) that you certainly don't need or want is a security risk? Meaning TFA solution, which addresses modeules, is a good methodology for many systems, especially servers?