I read Thus Spoke Zarathustra when I went through a phase of reading "classical" philosophy books. I remember liking it, though I don't remember much of it anymore.
That's what I do. But then I mostly use Arch or Arch based distros (e.g. EndeavourOS). So I have access to AUR. If something isn't on AUR (very rare, but can happen), I just create the package for it and publish to AUR. I do use some AlmaLinux machines as server. I don't really need many programs outside of the standard repos there since I use them mostly for hosting Docker images. But if I do need to install something like that, I've some self-written LURE install scripts.
The best way would be to use a VPS to proxy your traffic to you. You can achieve this for pretty cheap, just set up an wireguard tunnel to a cheap VPS. That's exactly how I access all my services from outside my home. As long as the VPS has a publicly accessible IP (most of them do), you being behind CGNAT should not be an issue.
There are sometimes reason to use it. It's shorter, so easier to remember. It's also easier to send in text. I use a selfhosted shortener, so I can use these as dynamic links and can change the target if I need to while keeping the shortlink the same. But I agree that most don't use it for respectable reasons.
This is the only reason why I still use GUI for making Linux USBs. Can't trust my ADHD ass to write the correct drive name. Also, none of my USB drives have a light.
Popsicle is pretty nice, it doesn't let you choose the internal drives afaik.
Yes, it just does what cp does. Only difference is that it makes hardlinks instead of copies. Unless you're using a COW filesystem, this might be better for most situations.
I've been using Cloudflare for my sites. They offer at-cost domain registration, and I've been pretty happy.