Looking for first impressions I keep coming back to [v1]

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

Mostly thinking out loud — feel free to push back hard.

The trade-offs here are not obvious to me and I keep flip-flopping. Spent the last few weekends digging into this and the deeper I go the more questions I have. Posting this here because the relevant subreddit has gotten too noisy lately.