Well it was written nearly a century ago, so it's not too surprising that diversity of representation was not great. Many countries got women's suffrage much later than that point in history.
Lots of people contributed really good answers, so I don't have anything valuable to add to their answers. But I wanted to point out for your detailed question, you include what you have done, what is your understanding and what are your shortcomings clearly. As opposed to a lot of posts with vague, detail-challenged narratives, that's a top notch post.
And the community delivered by giving good answers, so go community!
Also, you didn't just ghost after the initial post and interacted.with the people who graciously donated their time, so another bonus point there, as well.
I have been using porkbun.com as a domain registrar.
For email hosting, self-hosting is a lot of effort. If you just want the damned thing to work. I've heard good things about Fastmail, and personally I'm using migadu.com. it's $19/year for micro.
Use any imap client, or if you want to keep using what you're using Gmail and Outlook and Apple mail apps w all support your new personal account over imap as well
6GB is more than enough for many desktop environments. Plus, a server wouldn't have any anyway. not booting the Ubuntu installer seems like a bug, or other non-resource problem. if you try with a newer installer, or some other distro, that computer can host many things.
ZFS has a "copies=N" setting, but documentation and discussion I can find say there's no guarantee that the copies will end up on different devices (vdevs in ZFS parlance)
in addition to "dedicated Nas + compute node" and "just use a desktop" suggestions, there's the microserver option in between. Small, but has enough power to run stuff other than storage.
Hp proliant microserver is what I use, you can try getting a previous generation from second hand market.
"underpowered" routers are usually underpowered for multiple high bandwidth wireless connections. if you disable the wireless, shoving bits over copper would -usually- be efficient enough to not be the bottleneck.
Did you consider keeping the services closed to the outside world and using tailscale to access them? Doesn't work well if you want to give access to a bunch of people, though.
Master replicas already have a rocinante figure
https://www.masterreplicas.com/products/xl-the-rocinante