Show & tell: first impressions — am I overthinking this? [v1]

Long-time lurker, first-time poster. There is a lot of conflicting advice online and most of it is from 2019. I want to write something more comprehensive about this later but starting with a quick post to gather thoughts.

The trade-offs here are not obvious to me and I keep flip-flopping.

Been thinking about this for a while and curious what the community thinks. I tried three different approaches and none of them felt quite right.