I like shitting on Plex but you absolutely can stream entirely locally without internet.

Yeah like half of these things are required for the internet to function. The remainder seem like things that probably had good intentions but can be abused.

Mine has stayed the same for about 3 years now. My friend has theirs change any time there's a power cycle so a handful of times every year between power surges and firmware updates.

That's the right take. Every couple years I've given KDE a shot for a month and it just won't click no matter how much I configure it, this goes back pre plasma. I dislike gnome but it's closer to what I want out of the box, then popos came along and I realized I just wanted a tiling wm all along but needed the hybrid approach to enjoy adjusting.