mutations

That's correct, but, from my understanding, revolutionary mutations are orders of magnitude less likely to happen than evolutionary mutations.

Well, in the article it says there are 30,000+ mutations, so narrowing it down to the specific ones caused the cascade of other mutations is far from trivial.

Also, evolution is a game of chance, and the required mutations may not have occurred in humans yet.

Removing the appendix would presumably take multiple mutations that would have other, possibly harmful effects as well.

Whatever mutations cause cancer can't be that big a change, or they wouldn't happen so often.

Naturally, it doesn't allow for mutations or anything fancy, but it is an interesting curiosity.

They don't even know which are DNA mutations, and which are systematic sequencing errors.

Random mutations that give resistance may evolve differently even under the same evolutionary pressure.

With respect to performance, React shines when it comes to DOM mutations (e.g.

There is a lot of redundancy that affords protection against mutations.

They create new mutations in a new attempt to thrive.

I'm not grokking the significance of why changing everything and having mutations is bad.

You are simply defining "baseline" to be "free of negative mutations".

Given that you have stated that genes account for 50% of variability in intelligence (whether this variability stems from positive or negative mutations doesn't matter), you would actually disagree with the claim that "we are all born basically with equal potential" Your definition of "normal" in this context is not relevant and distracts from the actual issue of genetic variability vs environment.