WSL for me.
zkrzsz
Sail the sea.
In your word, pointless.
Mint Cinnamon. I would choose Zorin Lite (XFCE) as it has nice theme already.
You can try Real-Debrid, it's direct link so no need for torrent.
Try Dodi.
Setup Btrfs + Btrfs Assistant, rollback if any update breaks things you need.
It's stable enough for me everyday use but this will depend on your use case + hardware setup. Even some people will swear by Manjaro for years without breaking. I found that usually if stuffs break in Arch, i can fix it but not so much if stuffs break by update from Ubuntu/Fedora.
I find it hard to think you care about the beginner experience if you recommend Arch.
Can always change whatever you don't like, that's the strong part of KDE, unlike Gnome where you have to rely on 3rd party extensions and hope they don't break next update.
This is done via storing the unlock key in USB drive and need the USB plugged to auto unlock, see if it helps.
You can still do the auto snapshot daily/weekly plus the manual snapshot whenever big update coming or try something.