Most things you mention are a matter of buffering and waiting it out, so those will work in a 'basic' fashion as you say. But video conferencing? Even in a 1:1 call, where you need to download only one audio and video stream, if you don't live alone (most people don't), I would be very impressed if you got a router that can recognise and prioritise the call traffic to the point where that works smoothly.

I suspect there may be a fair few people in my position who would be happy to scale down. Whether or not that is actually the case is, indeed, a question for market research.

Yes, consume consume and keep consuming. Earn less and consume more!