Recommendations for small purchases — what would you do? [v5]

Looking for honest feedback, not validation.

There is a lot of conflicting advice online and most of it is from 2019. Spent the last few weekends digging into this and the deeper I go the more questions I have.

Not sure if this is the right place to ask, mods please remove if it is not. I tried three different approaches and none of them felt quite right.