Thanks for an informative article, and I hope your wife doing better now. At least folk are getting benefit of a story you might not otherwise have written.

I live in Europe and as an Engineer and once avid cyclist have experimented a lot with building and riding e-bikes.

The speed ranges you identified seem low, definitely in Europe, though those are the legal limits, most machines with explicit restrictors (Rather then under-powered motors) can be easily reprogrammed to de-restrict, and all the knowledge needed by anyone to do this is now on the internet.

Meals delivery business in UK at least seems to have exploded, an awful lot of people now order food to be delivered to home from takeaway food outlets, and the main mode of transport for delivery folk appears to be e-bikes. For sure they look for the fastest examples of e-bikes, which can do 30-40 mph, so as to remain competitive. But to their credit, most seem to use helmets.

Personally I think its an improvement, getting more cars off the road. Cars are a much bigger menace than e-bikes, I think.