Underrated the meta I keep coming back to [v3]

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. Looking for honest feedback, not validation. 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.