It's been like this for at least a couple of years.
It's really rather occasional (unless you're messaging new contacts all the time) and honestly it has not been a drag to me. It's only slightly annoying, compared to google captcha endless loops on Tor and the usual multiple attempts until it passes using VPNs.
Weird. That's the complete opposite of what we've seen. I've only seen it recently, it popped on regular contacts, and I don't have a group over 4 people. It also didn't do anything complex for me, just a check box. My wife got the full deal about choosing certain objects, though. This morning she got a notification that her message yesterday wasn't sent, so that was helpful.
