It is important, as closed source software can determine its own defaults, hijacking the initiative and eventually gaining majority. Just like Google is doing with Android and Chromium.
Dongles are actually not a compromise, but an upgrade in case you dont get a noname shitty one. You wont get a good builtin DAC for your 3.5mm port unless you buy a pretty expensive phone. Even then the quality is just "good enough" and not increasing linearly with the price.
A dongle does not need to be expensive for casual listening, and is by far the cheapest option for audiophiles as well. Alternatively you can use a bluetooth dac amp. Even more alternatively, you can buy a TWS adapter (forexample Fiio utws series) and an actually good IEM. You can buy both for the money you spare by not spending extra on some Sony and you will have a better audio experience.
I suggest buying Volla/Gigaset (has jack btw) and Fairphone since they are far more serviceable than any other devices. Fairphone will just send you a spare USB-C if you want.
Lemmy is not reddit. You can get lemmy instances as toxic as you want, it wont fuck up the rest of the community half as much.
Other than that, it is also not promoting that behaviour in the first place. Reddit inadvertently went that way because they were aiming on the monetisation front.
Moderators there are also incentivised to be greedy fucks. Hungarian community on /r/hungary never got on the next level because the mods do not want to fucking give up control to specialized subreddits. It is a valuable turf that has access to hundreds of thousands of citizens in a single place.
On lemmy you dont want to use a crappy client that does not give you a proper set of options among all instances.
Because words are used on basis of usefulness. Non-useful meanings die out. This community is primarily a platform and only vaguely centered around Linux.
Neither is the BSD community closer to playstation users.
Linux has Pulseaudio/Pipewire. You can stream audio on the network in arbitrary ways.