Best budget options I keep coming back to [v3]

Long-time lurker, first-time poster. 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. 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.