DaasYOchid and Dash2: My point is simple. Nowhere do you find in acharonim that one has to go to outlandish ways (for example, washing with detergent) to avoid certain problems. Soap has been around for millenia and so have strawberries been around for a very long time. Is there any acharon (apart from very recent days) that says you should wash them in soap? Of course, “toloim” are ossur but I have looked at thousands of strawberries and never seen any, certainly after rinsing them in water. Maybe you have better eyesight. Ironically, Even I have succumbed to these new chumros by cutting off the tops but soap? As far as water in New York, I am sure you know that this chumro was not accepted by the vast majority of Rabbonim.
I also gaurantee you that in Russia,Poland and everywhere in Europe, water was a lot less clean than in New York. Yet do you find anywhere a chumro of filtering water?
We are not “malachei Hashores” and we do not have to use microscopes, so a lot of these chumros have arrived because science has given us the capability of “seeing” more than our eyes. In truth, “ein ledovor sof’ because bacteria is everywhere, in ther air, in our food. We are responsible for stuff we see normally, not through one thousand maginifying microscope.
As far as ths other questions- I only have to refer you to the machlokes (especially in israel) about separate buses, back of the bus seating and, to the extreme chumroh of having separate cemeteries for men and women! Outlandish chumors, never found in Poskim.
By the way, your question about towels is not relevant today. In the mechaber’s time, they did not have the kind of towels we have today,just smooth towels (more like dish towels) and these could easily get soaking wet from drying the hands. Today’s towels (for the last 150 years or so) have looped fibers and absorb the water between these fibers,. They never get wet and certainly not soaking wet from drying hands.