I was super skeptical of this article, because I was trying to imagine how we'd have to arrange extractors in the oceans to pull any meaningful amount of energy

I was super skeptical of this article, because I was trying to imagine how we'd have to arrange extractors in the oceans to pull any meaningful amount of energy out of the rotation of the earth based on tides, and only at the end of the article did I see that assumption of 2% compounding multiplied out as far as needed...ugh. The implausibly is staggering, we'd run out of resources to build extractors way before causing any meaningful shift in the rotation: if the monstrous land barriers of the continents take millions of years to drain a small percentage of the energy, we have zero hope of achieving much more with the solid mass available to us on Earth, short of a Dyson sphere-level breakthrough in "moving mass around", oh, and by the way it has to happen deep underwater as well, and we need to channel all the energy somewhere useful! Way harder than just making a ginormous but thin solar array in space, which is almost certainly what we'd do instead from a "energy cost to arrange matter" optimization POV.