I looked even further into your claims, the zip downloading thing has zero evidence that I can find other than one guy on Reddit.

This is a pretty fair point. I think I saw one other analysis that was similar to the reddit guy, but most people who do security analysis of TikTok seem to say that it's not especially nefarious, or any more so than the other ones (which are all pretty nefarious). I don't know why I trust this guy and not those guys. I just found it credible and specific on the positive side, where the other side is proving the negative. But yeah, there might be a bit of confirmation bias there.