It was at one time maybe, but like all things you have to adapt and move. I think the article got it right, we've shifted from buildings what's best for the customer to building what the customer *thinks* they want.
Can't. You need to build a product that generates some revenue in order to pay for servers/developers. To do that, you need either subscribers or ads. People are only going to pay for it if it's really good AND there's a clear advantage over free users. People are only going to be online long enough to view ads if it's addictive. No other way around it.
Hey, this is really great! I used gut feels, spreadsheets, and wikipedia pages when I decided where I wanted to live. One thing that was really important to me, that your site doesn't cover, is growth. I grew up in a small town, and hated the "we're a small town where everyone knows everyone one and we want to keep it that way". I specifically filtered out cites that didn't show Year over Year growth, which surprisingly filtered out hundreds of cities and virtually every small town in America. You could create a section for "History" and then start with census data and work your way out. The age of the town probably reveals a lot too, like the average age of houses, types of jobs, etc...
I used Google way back in the day for a custom domain, but eventually got off that bandwagon and decided to host my own. Found that hosting my own was great for receiving emails, but a huge pain for sending. Eventually had to give that up too. I've used ProtonMail with that same custom domain since 2016. The mobile apps, web interface, and features have all gotten much better over time. That being said, I don't use a lot of personal emails anymore, and am considering iCloud from Apple. The only reason where I think iCloud is an improvement is because when signing up for an account that requires an email, Apple will automatically generate a 'relay' address for me. These relay addresses can be deleted at anytime, which solves the "unsubscribe from mailing list" that no company has ever honored. And really, that's all I look for in personal email provider. A way to make sure I only get a handful of messages in my inbox a week, and all the spam gets trashed.
Probably going to depend a lot on what "Computer Science" means to you, as that tends to cover a lot of different things. I'd start though my spinning up a "dev box" somewhere(Digital Ocean, AWS, Azure, etc), so that you can remote in from the work desktop and have a clean environment to build/program in. Having a remote workspace will allow you to login and immediately resume what you were doing, which could help a lot in this scenario. Just this bit alone will get you familiar with a Cloud Provider, SSH, and the linux command line.
Then as much as I hate it, you should take a project manager style approach. Decide on what you want to do(build an app, make a website, etc) and break it down into small task that you can complete in 5-10 minute chunks. This will let you chip away at something and you'll know quickly how much you have left. It also builds really piratical time management skills which will be helpful later in life. Just start with what you want to learn.