Some form of ground effect has been in use in every single year since then. There are aerodynamic devices that channel air below the car, that keep confined there with vortices running along the car, that extract the air from behind. They even removed some limitations at the beginning of 2022 and they can run with a flat bottom now.

not sure why the mad votes exactly

to my knowledge banning ground effect devices and geometries has been a decades long game of cat and mouse which at virtually no point has resulted in an on the track reality of equal footing due to a complete absence of positive traction from active or passive ground effect features on all cars

just about every race I've ever watched has featured that year's aero controversy front and center in the commentary

F1 has been as much about engineers racing the rules as drivers racing the cars as long as I've been watching

Well, they are prototypes. Every car is different so Formula 1 has always been more about the car than about the driver, despite the hype being more about drivers.

A good driver can get closer to the limit of the car than a worse one, that's right. However if the limit of another car is 1 second better, even with an average driver that faster car is going to win against the slower one with the good driver.

So to win titles: build a very good car, hire a good driver (which will be more than happy to come), possibly win driving with one arm like Schumacher, Hamilton and Verstappen did in many of the last 20 years. But even without a star you're going to win anyway if the car is good enough. Williams won with Damon Hill, Ferrari almost won with Irvine in 1999 when Schumacher missed many races for injury.

Senna died when his car lost downforce due to mechanical fault.

No, he died because of a steering column failure, not a loss of downforce.

Edit: I read up some more and it seems that noone really knows why he lost control. My previous impression was that the steering column broke mid-corner causing him to crash into the wall.

This is from an interview with Adrian Newey who designed the car: Newey admits that he has considered the causes of the crash repeatedly over the past 17 years. "If you look at the camera shots, especially from Michael Schumacher's following car, the car didn't understeer off the track. It oversteered which is not consistent with a steering column failure. The rear of the car stepped out and all the data suggests that happened. Ayrton then corrected that by going to 50% throttle which would be consistent with trying to reduce the rear stepping out and then, half-a-second later, he went hard on the brakes. The question then is why did the rear step out? The car bottomed much harder on that second lap which again appears to be unusual because the tyre pressure should have come up by then – which leaves you expecting that the right rear tyre probably picked up a puncture from debris on the track. If I was pushed into picking out a single most likely cause that would be it."

Yes, but strictly speaking he died because he was hit in the head with a wheel.

The halo, wheel tethers, and probably a few other modern things would have improved his odds.

I was indeed thinking, didn't debris hit him in the head. I guess there wouldn't have been debris without the crash

To clarify this, active ground effect was forbidden in 1982. What is the thing the GP is talking about. The prohibition has no relation to Senna, but it was because of another accident.

Ground effect in general has been in use since the F1 cars first changed shape, and is used everywhere, not only on race cars.