This comment resonates with me very closely. I majored in the humanities and honestly switched a few different careers in my 20s before settling on programming (long-time hobby).
You will probably find advice will be hugely varied and there is no single right answer. Ultimately your life is short and you should really plan around what you THINK will make you happy. If you get it wrong, no big deal -- you have the rest of your life to figure it out and you will probably find a way around to seeing what is the path of least resistance for you.
This is a good time to experiment and figure out what fits well for you.
I have been using NixOS for the last 6 months or so and it's been great for a daily driver. I use it across a half dozen machines I use for various purposes (desktop/laptop, some servers and VMs) and keep a similar setup on all my machines so they're similar and have all similar packages for reuse for my workflows.
The author is on point when you have to do any custom stuff (I basically have a bunch of hacks that do things a very non-NixOS way or use docker/containers for stand-alones) how rapidly things get out of hand. I still haven’t bothered trying to decipher some of that world yet.
In the grand scheme of things, apps as we know them are a product of the 2000s, right? Apps are unprecedented as well by that logic, which makes that seem less significant.
I mean we could also say that we might simply disagree with China politically enough to justify such an action (like the US has done against Cuba, Sudan or Iran).
I do agree with you and think though the fact that it's targeting a single company is a bit odd (like other commenters above has also said - why TikTok and not just an industry or sector from a country) and raises some concern from me as well.
You will probably find advice will be hugely varied and there is no single right answer. Ultimately your life is short and you should really plan around what you THINK will make you happy. If you get it wrong, no big deal -- you have the rest of your life to figure it out and you will probably find a way around to seeing what is the path of least resistance for you.
This is a good time to experiment and figure out what fits well for you.