TL;DR for anybody worried. systemd-tmpfiles --purge was too broad in scope (and has a confusing name) so now you must be more specific when using it to avoid accidentally deleting things.

I really doubt anything escaped the browser, but websites can make nefarious connections, sure.

I’m not certain but I believe it has been the default in 22.10 and newer.

This is a bit of misinformation. There is no evidence other filesystems have any downsides on an SSD. Use the default choice of your distribution. Roughly nobody uses F2FS on desktops. EXT4 is entirely reasonable and supports TRIM.

Canonical has been pushing their less portable Snap solution and moving away from traditional packages.

This means:

• They are the sole store host and decide what is allowed.
• The apps can be less secure or totally broken on other distros.
• The tooling to make snaps heavily incentivize only using Ubuntu as a base.