Anyone else budget options — what would you do? [v2]

Long-time lurker, first-time poster. Not sure if this is the right place to ask, mods please remove if it is not.

Been thinking about this for a while and curious what the community thinks. Maybe an unpopular opinion but here we go. Posting this here because the relevant subreddit has gotten too noisy lately.

There is a lot of conflicting advice online and most of it is from 2019.