Worst community norms after a year [v3]

For context, I am working with a pretty modest budget so high-end suggestions probably will not land.

The trade-offs here are not obvious to me and I keep flip-flopping. Posting this here because the relevant subreddit has gotten too noisy lately. This came up at a meetup recently and the room was split, so curious what the broader community thinks.

Quick context: I am relatively new to this and trying to find my footing. There is a lot of conflicting advice online and most of it is from 2019.