I wouldn’t say it is quite simple to do such a quality replacement in Photoshop. I’d argue that people with necessary skill level are rather rare.

The face is wrong

You guys are having own hostname in hosts file?

the ecosystem seems to have died about 2 years

Yeah, as I said elsewhere, less alive than before

it requires signing up to join the system

I think the point of the standard was that you don’t have to sign up with someone specific.

But in more general terms, of course one has to sign up with some bank or website or wallet that will receive the money or send the money.

AFAIK it was already working, though cumbersome to set up. Then a core enable stopped supporting it, and now it is less alive than before. However I’m not deep into the topic and the last info I got from this article.

There are efforts on a standard called Web Monetization

When Google Reader was alive, I wanted to improve its UI, so I wrote a userscript which completely replaced everything in the browser but still spoke to the Reader’s backend for data. When Reader was turned off, I only had to provide my own backend.