> Also, running a full Bitcoin node on a machine with a spinning rust disk and a relatively small amount of RAM is going to be hell

Is anyone even actually doing that? Even several years ago when I last did it, the blockchain was 60+GB (now it's more than twice that) and you were never, ever going to get anything out of it other than heating the room up.

The way I thought most people were going was using something like Electrum, where you still have your own private wallet that nobody else controls, but you're not yourself a full node.