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It would especially have been useful to see what is recommended in this day and age.

Yes, I'd really like to use a basic that is open source but cross platform and compiles to executable. I'm not sure such a thing exists tho!

in that list there is https://smallbasic.github.io/ ... but there may be better options.

One project which is trying very hard is SmallVisualBasic:

to answer my own question - poking through this list looks like QB64 would do it but also seems they split into 2 projects - QB64 and QB64PE