One Mr. Steve Craig from California USA must have amazing inside information about you and Bank of America Office North Carolina®.

Excellent detail!

Affinity Photo can use TopazPhotoAI as a plugin, but not Gigapixel. Gigapixel needs to be used as a standalone, either before or after editing in Affinity.

This should work to install the PhotoAI plugin:
Under Edit-Preferences-Photoshop Plugins, check the box Allow "Unknown" plugins to be used.

If that fails, you'll have to manually install the TopazPhotoAI plugin by finding the correct file and then telling Affinity where to find it. I know how to find the plugin file on a Mac but not Windows. It should be in a folder named something like:
c:\Program Files\Topaz Labs LLC\Topaz Photo AI\PS_Plugins_x64\

This page has instructions for both Mac and Windows and may help you further:
https://docs.topazlabs.com/other-apps/sharpen-ai/how-to-install-sharpen-ai-as-a-photoshop-plugin

It's not that the topic was posted on UHH in 2015 (was it?)
The point is that Reuters issued this rule in 2015. It's nothing new. And might have changed since then.

Of note, the original Petapixel article, "Reuters Issues a Worldwide Ban on RAW Photos." was posted on November 18, 2015.

Two snippets from that original article:

“As eyewitness accounts of events covered by dedicated and responsible journalists, Reuters Pictures must reflect reality. While we aim for photography of the highest aesthetic quality, our goal is not to artistically interpret the news.”

“Speed is also very important to us. We have therefore asked our photographers to skip labour and time consuming processes to get our pictures to our clients faster.”

What is your goal? If you want to back up the SSD to the cloud, you can use any cloud back up service, for example, IDrive. If on the other hand you want to back up the SSD to another physical drive, you can use Time Machine which your Mac should already have. Since Time Machine is set by default to exclude external drives from being backed up, you'll need to configure Time Machine by removing the SSD from the list of exclusions.

VueScan is an excellent program.

PC Matic is rated as a fairly mediocre antivirus program. Windows Defender is considered better, and Bitdefender (which I use) is often rated in the best category. PC Matic uses a "white list" whereas others use a "black list." If SilverFast is not on PC Matic's white list, PC Matic may prevent it from installing and running.

CCleaner (name was shortened from its original name "crap cleaner") has a checkered past; was hacked twice turning it into malware. But that was several years ago. No reported problems recently.

Malwarebytes is an excellent program, highly regarded, and well worth keeping. It has rescued PCs for me in the past.

I've had good results from Mixbook (www.mixbook.com)

RAW file contains all of the data your camera collected.

The straight-from-camera JPEG is a file derived from the RAW file, that your camera created, using settings for white balance, color saturation, sharpening and overall exposure, that your camera thinks are appropriate, and then compresses the image, discarding data that your camera thinks is no longer needed.

The RAW file provides you with all of the data, and permits you to adjust the exposure, saturation, sharpening, etc. that you prefer. Often using different settings in different parts of the image.

As Ysarex has demonstrated, you can recover highlights, brighten dark areas, adjust white balance. etc. to reveal details in the image that the JPEG has lost, but that your eye saw when you took the photo, because your eye has greater dynamic range than your camera, and because your eye automatically adjusts when looking at bright and dark areas.

Many times the JPEG will be satisfactory. The RAW file requires work on your part, but affords the opportunity to do better. And often "rescue" a decent photo from a throw-away JPEG that your camera would have created.

What are your computer specs, and how large a picture are you processing?

I have a MacBook Pro with M1 chip, just processed a 61 MB CR3 RAW file with Topaz Sharpen AI using standard settings. It took just under 10 seconds.

I bought the 800 mm (to use on my R5) back when the 100-500 mm was on backorder everywhere. I found that it performed well when the light was good. However, not as sharp as the 100-500 proved to be. In low light situations the autofocus struggled. I ended up selling it.

RAW

And does the offending post get removed?

Think "kerning"