You touch on one of the most annoying things about TSA: the inconsistency. Every airport seems to have slightly different rules, and the agents treat you like an idiot if you don't know theirs. Sorry, Mr. Cop School Reject, I've been to ten other airports this year and none of them did it your way. Even the same airport can vary sometimes. It's impossible to believe the rules are doing any good when each of them is skipped half the time and there's no effect at all.

Do you know when they stopped? It's been ~14 months since I last flew in the US and they were still making me take evvvvverryyyything out.

At the time I was typically travelling with a laptop, a tablet, and two USB-C portable monitors. It was quite a lot to unpack and re-pack.

NB: Out of concern for the sanity of myself and my fellow travelers sharing a TSA I made sure I could do it as fast as humanly possible. Everything was packed to allow the quickest possible retrieval in line...

Toiletries maybe, but devices still come out from what I've seen unless you're PreCheck (which is well worth the $ just for that and to not have to take off your shoes; went precheck last year and never going back).

The ones I frequent tend to ask to remove the small liquids, but I don’t do that anyway. It almost never comes up, which somehow makes it even worse.

Most of them still seem to require removing devices. I've only seen a few with the newer machines that don't require it.