I have only managed to convince ONE person to watch Neon Genesis Evangelion, tragically, because it's my favorite tv show of all time.

A lot of weed

tell that to the cheapest apartment I could find being, quite literally, more than half my income.

The simple answer is lobbying. Bribery is legal here, our politicians are all bought and paid for by these very companies. Laws are not usually put into place for any reason other than making them more money.

More focus on the ability to maintain, repair, and perhaps even upgrade existing tech. So often people are pushed to upgrade constantly, and devices aren't really built to last anymore. For example, those yearly trade in upgrade plans that cell phone providers do. It sucks knowing that, once the battery in my cell phone finally dies, the whole phone is essentially garbage and has to be replaced. I miss my older smartphones that still had replaceable batteries, because at least then it's just the battery that's garbage.
We're throwing so much of our very limited amount of resources right into landfills because of planned obsolescence.

It is, but most of their library is DRM free, so once you download it, those files are yours. Steam won't let you launch a game without logging into your account, gog doesn't even check.

I'm not totally against all telemetry... but can they at least be transparent about when they use it, and exactly what they're collecting? It really could be as simple as just defaulting to asking the user.

If collecting brings you joy, do it. It keeps retro hardware out of the landfills.

Linux really isn't ideal for anyone who isn't already a tech enthusiast on some level. I recently did a fresh install of Kubuntu and after about a week, it prompted me that there were updates, so I clicked the notification and ran the updates, after which my BIOS could no longer detect the UEFI partition. I had to use a live usb to chroot into the system and repair it, as well as update grub, in order to fix it.
It's fixable, but this is not something anyone who doesn't already know what they're doing can fix. I've had auto updates in the past put me on boot-loops thanks to nvidia drivers, etc.
This kind of thing needs to almost never happen for linux to be friendly for those who just want their computer to work without any technical understanding. This, honestly though, can't happen because of the nature of distros, you can't ever make guarantees that everything will work because every distro has slightly different packages.
Wine is getting better, but compatibility is still an issue, especially for people who rely really heavily on microsoft office or adobe products.

I'm not getting my hopes up, but I'd like to see this influence the smartphones being sold in the US as well. One of the primary things that keeps me replacing my smartphones is battery life, so being able to replace the battery would be incredible.

I wouldn't say that it's evil, but rather it doesn't exist for the benefit of players, it exists for the benefit of corporations. They know that it hurts performance in games and prevents a lot of people from playing games that they've legitimately purchased, but so long as it's preventing some piracy they do not care.

Just make your account on an instance that refuses to federate with meta, there's groups of people agreeing to do so.