Wealth is anything beyond having the necessities of life covered.
If you can afford a reasonable home, your bills, food, any dependents, eating out once a week, hobbies, taking a holiday or two per year, and contributing to your retirement then you're living comfortably.
Anything beyond that is wealth, it allows you to splash out on luxury products, luxury holidays etc.
Some people may never realise they're wealthy because they live excessively and believe that's the norm, ie payments for an overpriced car, spending excessively on hobbies etc
Personally I host static websites with GitHub, cloudfront, netlify, onrender etc. Trivial to setup, more reliable and better cdn distribution. Anything dynamic lives in a data center rather than a self host setup.
Fair, but you were asking how people approach security for self hosted solutions and I guess I'm challenging why anything needs to be public. Self hosting is typically for your own services which can usually be hidden behind a VPN.
The exception I guess is email, but I never understand why people attempt self hosted mail servers
Don't expose anything publicly, instead setup wireguard for every VM. Connect your phone, PC etc to the VPN so you have full access without publicly exposing anything.
You may have touched on this but your post was way too long so I only read the headings
Their target market are people they can upsell extended warranties, anti-virus, etc to. So if you're buying individual computer components you already have too much knowledge for them to exploit you
It would be more useful to see metrics weighted per active user it's trivial to update a server if it's just for yourself, and likewise it's easy to let it lag a few versions behind.
What's more relevant is the version number the large instances are running
That's actually pretty reasonable. I'd be happy to make my open source projects compliant for a company - but they can damn well pay me for the effort.
More likely that they know of all the data they gather this is the most privacy defying, and impossible to anonymise so they're fixing it before the EU forces them to.
I think is the logic used for Linux kernel versioning so you're in good company.
But everyone should really follow semantic versioning. It makes life so much easier.