Even though I would very much like for this to change, this is true, having a phone number is very important

problem is, among the items you enumerated, phones (usually) are the cheapest (not comparing flagship phones here, you can get good-ish entry level phone at 150-200 USD (I use one) and goodish laptops start around 300 (and even then it is mostly underpowered chrmoebooks, many of of which are not good), tablets (entry level) start at about the same prize of phones, but for a given prize, you would get other specs lower (they have to cut cost somewhwere, and larger screen costs more). Now, these tablets can serve as a carrier for information, but that would not be the most ideal solution.

that very much depends on manufacturer of the phone, not all manufacturer supliment the purchase price of phones with those bloatware deals, you can definitely find some good ones in a pile of dirt

This would be equivalent of not letting under-14s into libraries or read anything practically for that matter in 1900s. Phones are not just used for social media or gaming, you are limiting the conversation abilities, accessibility of information, and freedom

reinventing shell scripting. Though I am guilty of this, I do something like this (more complex) but essentially a shell script in rust just because for some application, reading files is slower that way

can you give more details about your system, what kernel you are using what distro? also, have you tried testing a live boot usb to do testing, and also (I am presuming that you changed motherboard, and kept rest same) can you replace 1 part at a time and check.

Usually random breakages mean memory or power errors, and even different modules breaking can be caused by corrupt storage (maybe the readheads of hdd are broken, or if ssd, something something something, maybe broken/damged contacts). But you say going back to older cpu fixed this. Can you check what speed does your menory work at, sometimes, stable ram speeds depend on cpu, maybe you had it lower/higher for older cpu (usually lower than stable is not issue, higher is the issue), or maybe, your newer cpu is drawing more power, or you have some kind of faulty contact and some stray currents are developing on your motherboard. A fey more details would be really helpful

what they basically say is that (and this is only valid for people using tor or mullvad browser with stock settings) if everyone has the same fingerprint, and if you dont sign in to anything else, they basically look same to the websites, so you dont have to use some privacy frontend, it is ot adding in any benefit. However, these conditions deffenitely are not that easy to meet for day to day use.