yeah im not wild about maintenance of my bike than maintenance of my home.

That's insane.

Chain rings don't tend to take much wear. Cassettes absolutely do. And your rear derailleur always appreciates some love.

If you keep up on chain replacements you'll triple the life of your rear cassette.

Your front chain rings will likely last several years, unless you got one of those stupidly small chainsets, often a 1x. That 1x and small size are going to maximize wear.

Just getting a compact and using your gears will easily double that.

And I don't really understand why you would switch out just one or maybe two big cogs in the front for numerous on the back?

And then you get cross chaining... Which produces a lot of friction and drag.

While, if you have a triple and maybe seven in the back you can align your front gears to your back gears and you can get a really nice straight line most the time. Paddle shifters are designed for these trade offs.

Like you want to keep your small chainset cog in line with your big ones in the back, this gives you the maximum low gear torque. You want to keep your meds with your meds when there's guides for this on the internet ... you don't really want to be out of gear by more than about maybe 2 spots/shifts (pedal your bike! Cadence!). And of course the biggest chainset cog is in line with the smallest cassette cog giving you maximum power when you need it.

Like a 1x12 has one sweet spot and somewhere in the middle of the gears. And you only got 12 gears.

A 3x7 has three really good sweet spots they're all in very distinctive gear ratios. 21 gears, plenty of overlap.

In the 5 years I’ve had my current bike, I think it’s on it’s fourth drivetrain?

How many miles a day are you putting on that thing to go through so many?!