If you have hard water, I suggest a whole-house water softener and reserve reverse osmosis for the kitchen.
Re: remineralization. Ick, I just skip these. They taste awful to me.
Deinionized water on the other hand immediately chemically to pull in ions. So same action, but with a more powerful mechanism. You'd probably have to drink a lot of deionized water to cause issues, plus water reionizes pretty quickly in air, and it takes terrible.
In the Netherlands and afaik all surrounding countries, this is definitely not necessary. Drink tap water all you want.
You cannot go wrong with tap water.
Now, there is the matter of taste. My tap water is ok, some are much better. I drink from a Brita pitcher (the one with overpriced filters) and the taste is noticeably better.
But again it is just the taste. The safety of tap water is a given here (town halls have to post results from water tests that are done on a regular basis).
> there are the usual low quality, planned obscelesence game playing techniques to sort through
Umm, a water filter is mostly a reservoir, tubing, and a pile of chemical reactants. This is not planned obsolescence. This is just pure chemistry. The reactants become saturated and need replacing.
All water filtration systems require periodic changing of filters.
That said, there are many stage filtration systems, and you don't need most of them. A three-stage reverse osmosis system will give you the cleanest water possible. Like mine was a 4 stage with a final remineralization step that I just didn't hook up.
If you want to understand it better watch this [1], just skip the deionization step because drinking deionized water is very unhealthy.