Underrated the new release — am I overthinking this? [v2]

This came up at a meetup recently and the room was split, so curious what the broader community thinks.

There is a lot of conflicting advice online and most of it is from 2019. Posting this here because the relevant subreddit has gotten too noisy lately. Not sure if this is the right place to ask, mods please remove if it is not.

I want to write something more comprehensive about this later but starting with a quick post to gather thoughts. 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.