Show & tell: workflow tweaks — am I overthinking this? [v1]

There is a lot of conflicting advice online and most of it is from 2019. Maybe an unpopular opinion but here we go.

Spent the last few weekends digging into this and the deeper I go the more questions I have. Mostly thinking out loud — feel free to push back hard. The trade-offs here are not obvious to me and I keep flip-flopping.