It totally sounds stupid but somehow I'm guilty of it too. I've even rebought games on Steam that I have on Switch because of that and the fact that I know my Steam games will be future proof for new hardware

Don't worry, MS is planning to fix that soon I've heard. They're just going to get rid of control panel and continue to dumb down Settings

Maybe look into a used Thinkpad P series? They run Linux well, are typically more affordable than a new laptop which will definitely be 1K upwards, and have a 16 inch screen

Not just a text file, a markdown file. And markdown has supported images since forever

I haven't used Irfanview in a long time now. Personally, I think there are many better alternates for it on Linux now.

Qview is open source, cross platform, and at least for me on Linux, is faster than Irfanview. I'm also a big fan of KDE's Gwenview.

If you need to do batch conversion, Converseen does the job well since it's basically just a GUI for ImageMagick

PostmarketOS with Phosh or Plasma Mobile perhaps? Both are meant for relatively low powered, touch-first devices

I just the Xperia phones weren't ridiculous expensive. Why is it impossible to get all these features on a modern smartphone <$600 USD that's not from a Chinese manufacturer?

Depends on the person. Most of the people I know who use MacOS, use it as a glorified Facebook machine. Outside of perhaps Word, they only use the web browser.