Yep I pay an outrageous $1100/mo for my spouse and I. The coverage isn’t even that good. Looking to shop around this year because that big of a bite out of paycheck really hurts, but I suspect I’m not going to find any better.

Many of the common ones are considered automatically suspicious by a lot of sites, though not necessarily fully blocked. Especially cheaper ones. Expect lots of Cloudflare captchas.

Nah, unfortunately I watched this video a couple weeks ago and while it is a waste of time, there is at least a bit more to it than that. DNS is part of it but it’s more “I built a regular router”. The backstory is the OP’s apartment has some kind of shady wireless ISP as their only option. They build a router to hide connecting multiple devices behind NAT (which they barely even talk about), but they don’t do much else to actually hide devices. Honestly it’s really basic and could be achieved with a cheap travel router, though the 3D printed enclosure they built is pretty cool.

Even if you’re not a Linux networking neckbeard and want to learn this video isn’t worth watching because it just glosses over the actual useful/interesting/complicated parts.

Previous 3 major release upgrades I’ve done were smooth, ymmv

If your purpose is long term archival you should probably be using M-Disc Blu-rays anyway, which are still actively made by Verbatim (and one other company).