PSA: the meta — am I overthinking this? [v1]

There is a lot of conflicting advice online and most of it is from 2019. Not sure if this is the right place to ask, mods please remove if it is not.

Mostly thinking out loud — feel free to push back hard. 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. The trade-offs here are not obvious to me and I keep flip-flopping.