One of the few positives of today's designs is the better screen-to-body ratios that we have. This would mean that we can have a 5" screen in the same physical body size that previously used to house a 4 point something inch screen. But for some reason the latest flagship small phones are from a few years ago - I guess sales figures show they're not sought after.
General advice - don't be picky about dedicated media controls; sure they're nice to have, but they severely limit your choices (I was in that boat too). At the same time it's very easy to make key combinations; e.g. the Caps Lock key very often gets neglected, and if this is the case for you, you can repurpose it to Fn, and from there you can do Fn+W to play/pause, Fn+Q/Fn+E for prev/next track respectively and so on (of course the specific keys are up to you). Look for QMK/VIA support over manufacturer-specific software.
Sorry I can't give a more specific recommendation. I second the idea that Keychron generally have good value for the money, so do Vortex and Ducky (although Ducky have gone up in price while not staying very competitive).
"Пиян като мотика". Translates from Bulgarian to "Drunk as a mattock". I remember asking my dad about this phrase when I was a kid - "Why? Do mattocks drink?" - and he answered "No, they fall down". Classic dad.
Could be, I don't know. I doubt that video creators would go through all of these old videos just to update them to a slightly higher bitrate; the other possibility is that YouTube kept the original uploads or higher bitrate variants without previously showing them (and only showed them now), but that seems like a huge waste of storage, so it seems unlikely to me. Again, we're talking about old uploads (2-3 or up to 10 years ago), not new ones.
The one thing I've seen that makes sense is updating old videos that were previously available at up to 480p and bringing them up to 720p or 1080p (with the idea of keeping the original published video with the views, comments and so on instead of uploading a new one).
Ads aside, what's been infuriating me lately is that YouTube seems to have degraded the quality of existing videos and locked the previously available quality behind the "1080p Enhanced Bitrate"; I have no way of confirming this since I obviously don't have Premium, but I'm fairly sure that the regular 1080p of old videos that I rewatch from time to time (uploaded 2-3 years ago or earlier) is now worse than it was. If it was about new uploads with something previously unavailable, it would've been somewhat understandable. Something also tells me that the paid tier is also going to get ads eventually.
One of the few positives of today's designs is the better screen-to-body ratios that we have. This would mean that we can have a 5" screen in the same physical body size that previously used to house a 4 point something inch screen. But for some reason the latest flagship small phones are from a few years ago - I guess sales figures show they're not sought after.