For me what made a huge difference was adding acid, specially for stews. A hearty splash of vinegar or soy sauce while stewing, or even a dash of lime just before serving takes it from "meh" to "seconds please!".
Donwside to 2: Your VM becomes harder to move between hardware, you lose snapshotting capabilities from a copy-on-write image.
5 is flexible, but has limitations. For example you wouldn't want to run databases on NFS volumes.
If initialization time is the only problem with 4, you could create several smaller images on the disk. Create the first one, initialize the VM and set up an LVM volume on it, then start creating more volumes and extend the LVM volume.
What REALLY irks me is that the gboard keyboard on Android is context-sensitive. No, I don't want to have a shortcut for ".com" when long-pressing the period key while typing an address, I want to type a fscking dash!
No. What's terrifying and dystopian is that the industry has been turning a blind eye to abusive behavior for so long that deplatforming becomes necessary.
If you frequently work on remote systems you frequently only get command line access, where you can still use vim/nano/emacs but not a full IDE like VS Code. In that case you might find it more convenient to learn one text editor well and forgo the IDE.
GOG for offline games, Steam games that are online multiplayer or can benefit from cloud saves.