Good post, but the second story about the Android phone was more a complaint about desired features that the phone didn't provide, more than a bug. I'd put that in a different category. Software can't be everything to everyone.
On the gripping hand, "silence.mp3" has been the solution for the author's "mom problem" for a good 20 years too. I hope they don't mean to imply you can't assign individual ringtones to contacts on stock Android? Even the K800i I had as a teenager supported that.
On the yet another hand (we're moving fast into octopod territory here), for a moment here I was wondering what the author was smoking with the "ringtone & notifications" complaint. I don't remember seeing an Android phone that did not have separate volume slider for each. Then I realized, I never actually owned a stock Android phone. Still, to support the author's point against Google specifically, Samsung managed to not have this problem for at least 10 years now.
My solution to avoid this was to play "silence.mp3" in a repeat loop in another app, and then my music app would play over that and there were no pops when I started a song. IDK if the pop problem has been fixed, or whether it was a software or hardware issue.
This is why I included a screenshot of the volume sliders my Google Pixel displays. Samsung doesn't use stock android OS, and some Samsung users tend to assume every android phone works the same.
You can do that.