PS. Not a Soviet Union fan otherwise...
Not entirely true on american side, but there was a definite trend on US side to depend more on human in the loop.
(That setup was later avenged for all its tragic mishaps by SpaceX's Falcons.)
But a lot of other options, doable earlier, would have been possible if there was less perfectionism applied to automated flight - that's the argument I've heard.
N.B. Currently used Soyuz spacecraft (not the carrier rocket) is derived from the moon program capsule.
His death was a major setback for the Soviet space program. Arguably they never found a real replacement for him.
What was the probable reason is the lack of testing of the huge system of the first stage of N-1 all together - test stands required lots of money and also time, both were in short supply (N-1 is surprisingly a rather inexpensive rocket, in comparison, say, to a better flown Energiya). Engines on the first stage were also untested, by design - they were single-start engines, so they couldn't be tested on a test stand before actual launch.
Both of these problems were taken into account when Energiya was developed. It had a huge "stand-start", both for testing and for launching, and engines were fully reusable, with the idea of later returning the first stage of the launcher (horizontal landing, with parachutes) and flying it again.
Yes, basically. My understanding is that it was a very fancy RC car with extra strong antennas to be able to give video feeds from the 4 cameras and receive commands live from Earth. (Plus bells and whistles like solar panels and a plutonium heater, see [0].)
The moon is only 1 light second away, so remote controlling a car that moves at 1 mph is not too much of an issue. (Though with bad video quality it is still a challenge, see the fate of Lunokhod 2.)
[0] https://eandt.theiet.org/content/articles/2011/03/rovers-lea...
For one type of satellite that I heard about, the US were dropping the film canisters and catching them in flight, to develop later: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corona_(satellite)
Original Vostok had higher engineering standards than crafts that were launched more than a decade later, after the hype subsided below the level needed to keep the space programme a top level state project.