Static analyzers like https://github.com/zizmorcore/zizmor can help find such misconfiguration. It is however unfortunate, that such footguns aren't harder to fire.
Making it solely about the extraction of dollars is a great recipe to make something mediocre. See Hollywood or Microslop.
Its like min-maxing a Diablo build where you want the quality of the product to be _just_ above the "acceptable" threshold but no higher because that's wasting money. Then, you're free to use all remaining points to spec into revenue.
I think its cool that more people are building what I call "calm tech". More technology should try to serve a purpose quickly and then get out of the way instead of trying to artificially stay on your screen as long as possible.
I habe a "Pocketbook Verse Pro" that runs Linux. No need to root, you can copy ARM executables to the SD card and run them (that's how I use Syncthing on it). KOReader also works on it.
I built my own reader because I didn't want unread items to accumulate. It just shows what was published the last X days.
The result is that there is no need for persistent storage, so its real easy to host. If you're interested, its here: https://github.com/lukasknuth/briefly