I do not know how that would be possible with the technology used, but having a deeplink to a planet or object would be cool à la https://atlasof.space/Nix
aditionally, I'd like to get one free favicon, as to ensure I actually get a favicon, properly formated .ico file (which are way more different from .png files than just the .ico extention)
a prominent example of this was the first google nexus 7 tablet, née Asus Memo Pad. Therein somehow the NAND flash became used up in some strange fashion making write speed unbearable. This also could not be fixed with a factory reset.
Since this article was written in 2005, multiple attempts have been made to establish non-rectangular UIs.
The mentioned Daisy Disk delights in its hierarchical view.
Ça. 2010 there was an initiative for an entire phone UI based on this kind of concept. This went nowhere but Android 4 tried to incorporate as slide in from the side circular menu. [1]
Most recently HTC incorporated this kind of UI in their U11 phone launcher. [2]
Forgoing the entire concept of rows and columns of pixels to render a UI though is just asking for trouble as all assumptions about arrangement go out of the window. With sufficiently high resolutions screens (we've achieved that) an arbitrarily shaped UI can be displayed. Masterfully demonstrated here in Neil Sardesai s UI experiments [3]
As for having the menu separate from the content canvas, foldables are currently a great experiment platform for this, see Samsungs "flex mode" [4]
Truly sorry to hear about your experiences. If you are not explicitly a founder, just do not work for companies that doesn't actually have at lease a couple of employees doing non-managerial IT work. Otherwise the founders may be inexperienced in managing IT teams and consider it okay to pile on forever more work to a stagnant IT staff and be down-right exploitative like in your first example.
When interviewing for a position, remember that you are also interviewing the company. You already know what doesn't work for you, so ask about it. Don't be shy, you're not desperate for that job, you're a developer in Berlin, people want you!
What even are "productive hours"? Only the ones where you type symbols into your IDE? Revisit this article [1] from the hn front-page a few days ago then.