Show & tell: edge cases after a year [v2]

Looking for honest feedback, not validation. Not sure if this is the right place to ask, mods please remove if it is not. Posting this here because the relevant subreddit has gotten too noisy lately.

Maybe an unpopular opinion but here we go. I tried three different approaches and none of them felt quite right. Not sure if this is the right place to ask, mods please remove if it is not.

The trade-offs here are not obvious to me and I keep flip-flopping. There is a lot of conflicting advice online and most of it is from 2019. For context, I am working with a pretty modest budget so high-end suggestions probably will not land.