Easy to make up, impossible to corroborate.

It tells us that Romans disapproved of messing with food almost as much as with religion.

I think mixing jewels with food or medicine was not uncommon in the antiquity, or at least I've heard of it often.

Even today it's not that odd to have gold foil in food.

Also a documented kind of bread in Rome was made with clay.

No, the article specified his religious beliefs were worse than that. I find drowning people with flower petals to be the most objectionable act listed.

It's not about our opinion of him, which is irrelevant, because he's dead. It's about how he failed politically. Committing a religious sacrilege so offensive to people that they killed him for it is politically incompetent. Our moral judgement of that fact -- as readers of HN in the year 2022 -- is irrelevant to his political fortunes in the year 222.

Let's say that you're an English king in the year 1680. You're openly Catholic; and for that, you get deposed. From our moral opinion in the year 2022, that king did nothing wrong. From a political point of view though, he was terrible. And his terribleness was caused by him being an openly Catholic king in England in the year 1680. It was the worst thing he did politically because it ended his political career.

I didn't read that as literally asphyxiating them, just dumping a bunch of petals on them. I can imagine it might not be as funny to the guests as it was to him, though.

The original source for the story mentions some people were smothered to death.