Hot take: edge cases on a tight budget [v2]

Been thinking about this for a while and curious what the community thinks.

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

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