I like shitting on Plex but you absolutely can stream entirely locally without internet.

Yeah but it gives people that take security seriously an opportunity to move over people that don't. I had so many people moved over and most of them switched back to sms when it was dropped from signal. Now my options are pestering people I care to do something they don't want to, cut off contact, or suck it up and lose security myself.

Yeah like half of these things are required for the internet to function. The remainder seem like things that probably had good intentions but can be abused.

That's the right take. Every couple years I've given KDE a shot for a month and it just won't click no matter how much I configure it, this goes back pre plasma. I dislike gnome but it's closer to what I want out of the box, then popos came along and I realized I just wanted a tiling wm all along but needed the hybrid approach to enjoy adjusting.

Mine has stayed the same for about 3 years now. My friend has theirs change any time there's a power cycle so a handful of times every year between power surges and firmware updates.