Re: Happiness, my personal experience corroborates, for what it's worth - though inversely to the headline: I love iOS development and can produce reliable, complex UIs with react-ish state-view management in a day, with no 3rd party frameworks; when I do web (UI mostly), I'm miserable and unmotivated.
I've been lucky enough not to run into the things people often complain about with Apple. They don't mysteriously reject my apps; and when they deprecate/require something, the reason makes sense to me and it's easy to accommodate. The differences I experience are rather in the quality of languages and APIs/frameworks.
SwiftUI is the exception. If they deprecate UIKit/autolayout, I'll move to the backend in one weekend.
There’s a place for DRM and similar protections, I don’t think they’re going anywhere.
But I’m still hopeful that phone, email, web, voip, videochat, photo and video editing, location, maps, document sync, etc, will one day work seamlessly on FOSS devices.
I do think that the apps will have to be recreated as FOSS, existing apps will always be antagonistic because they get a lot of revenue from being able to control how/when/where the software is run.
Hospital IT systems are infamously horrible at maintaining computer systems. I worked in healthcare tech at one point and I remember back around 2016 we were still forced to support Internet Explorer for hospital systems that had simply never updated.
The person who buys them isn't the person who has to use them, and the procurement is done at too large and abstract a scale for requirements more complicated than checkboxes.
You can absolutely find video tutorials on all the hobbies and daily stuff you list, and in most communities you can find groups that will teach you informally for free or in a slightly more structured way for a nominal fee. Where formal credentials exist, they tend to be based on observed skills (like a culinary arts degree or certification as a sommelier). I'm not sure the demand for MOOCs is there for most hobbies.
There are some exceptions for hobbies with a well delimited body of knowledge (eg birdwatching)
I agree with parent
— there is no prestige issue and other contributing factors include a desire for specialized community that is absent in later years, plus reduced ability to/interest in relocating.
While you can certainly get it for free, having a cohort and a badge that perhaps could serve as a prerequisite could benefit all students and all teachers/schools.
Probably significant in terms of speed of development, time spent maintenance projects, etc