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> At least to my layman's eye the new patents don't seem to be particularly revolutionary

It's the same trick that pharmaceutical companies use to extend their patents. Find a slightly new use or way that also covers the old use, and bam, exclusivity for another 20 years.

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People say this but I’ve never been quite clear. Outside of medicine where you can convince doctors to insist on your new better safer cap or whatever is there anything stopping people from just building a product without the new patents. You still aren’t allowed to patent things with prior art right? So you can’t legally wait till your product is about to loose patent protection and then patent another existing aspect of it

Well the law on the matter really depends on the relative size of your legal team.

What does that look like exactly? Patenting something they’re already doing?

Corporations with large legal teams are able to discourage others from experimenting in areas near expiring patents by coming up with "novel uses" and other such legal loopholes that effectively extend their patent protection despite what seem to be clear limits.

This effect in the case of eInk is clearly described by others in this thread.

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