I don't feel like linux is expensive investment for everyone.
I am a first year CS student. when I got my first laptop recently, I got crazy and installed debian (had some prior experience with command line), it didn't work very well for laptop. All DEs except enlightenment (yeah i even tried it) had lots of display related glitches due to cheap hardware.
Then I moved on and installed fedora. Nothing to tweak from CLI. Just changed few settings from GUI and peace of mind even on relatively obscure hardware.
It has been vastly simplified and worth it for anyone in IT / CS related fields.
What he suggested wasn't viable in terms of productivity either. One may be programmer but don't want to spend time administering the insignificant parts of the system.
I never understood the culture of elitism in system micro-administration by hobbyist crowd.
nano isn't very weak, I have modified nanorc substantially and also have binded many keys. It works better than, say, notepad++ on windows.
For those who aren't touch typists, or occasional users, nano is just more comfort than vim or emacs.
And there is a editor named `micro`, which is similar to nano but has more features including bracket completion etc.. I am delaying switch because it is written in go (being unavailable in repos) and anyway I haven't found time to configure it. But it is scriptable in lua..
I use ubo and have used AMP in past. UBO is an excellent ad blocker, but as far as bandwidth savings are concerned, it doesn't come close to AMP. Of course I use UBO with JS off by default which is better and arguably more secure. But I still occasionally have to unbreak sites.
Not everyone can buy $800 iPhone or close to that. Being from a third world country, I understand how valuable it was to have a cheap smartphone (umm laptops were too costly) so my main interest shifted from physics to CS / Programming..
If you don't like Google AMP, it is fine.. (of course I too prefer to browse with only HTML & CSS whenever it works).. If you don't like low end hardware standards, it is fine.. But they have solved real world problems, whether first world problems or not. Not everything is black and white..