I hope that the business decisions that Microsoft is starting to make, i.e. becoming increasingly consumer unfriendly, will help drive people to Linux.
I know many people in the self-hosting community re-purpose old laptops as lightweight web servers. If you're interested in learning Linux, this machine would be a good one to learn on for a lightweight distro.
It's a good idea for the sake of your privacy to remove the metadata from the picture. While for a picture of a pet it is less important, it's still a good idea to get in the habit of nixing the metadata. Don't make it easier for you to be tracked and profiled.
Absolutely you should care! The more people that demand this capability the more that Intel and AMD will have to offer this kind of support. In fact, we should demand that the Intel Management Engine and the AMD equivalent be equipped with capability to completely disable it.
The main reason to do it is when the manufacturer no longer releases security updates for the phone. Given the security history and the typical corporate attitude of caring little for the customer, I want to minimize the risk posed by not having a very out of date operating system.
Yeah CGNAT makes things a pain in the ass but it's not a show stopper. Get a cheapie cloud VPS and install NGINX Proxy Manager (NPM) on it. Then do a WireGuard tunnel between your server and the cloud VPS. Problem solved. Or you could use Cloudflare tunnels but I wouldn't recommend that.
Do let us know how it goes. Just remember that the wheels turn slowly from the time you make the formal complaint to the time it becomes adjudicated. It's my personal belief that you have a strong case but I'm not an attorney.
IMHO, Android doesn't really count. We are looking at pure Linux usage on desktops here.