If Amazon sales of "MP3 players" are indicative it's simmering; I see a handful with over 1-2K sales per month (assuming we can trust those numbers, it is Amazon after all). I imagine it's going to be a bit muted for a while due to the memory and storage price gouging and that may push more people towards CD's, which are already seeing a resurgence.
I've not seen one thus far here on the Fediverse. If you haven't already, check out this site which has some exhaustive instructions for working with the BC-250 - it was invaluable when I got mine!
Tiny Core Linux
Quite true; this seems to be the standard practice, however, for companies when they want to keep the high prices hidden from casual viewing and commentary.
A student who graduated from my high school had their admission to a university rescinded for things they said and did in a Facebook group for accepted students.
They don't want the bad press of openly gouging people for that, especially with how bad prices are already.
If you want a smaller stepping stone, check out LMDE!
From a quick look at the documentation, if the hardware has WiFi capability you can configure OPNsense to be an access point as well. Personally, I keep the two separate: I have a small N200-based box as my OPNsense router and a separate access point running OpenWRT for the wifi devices on my network.
Oh, they have KDE in their repo, it's just not the out-of-box default.
If you're okay with something other than vanilla Debian, give Linux Mint Debian Edition a look. I used it for years without significant hiccups playing a wide variety of games. I switched to Bazzite after testing it out and liking the immutable aspects of it (though as another commenter mentioned, there is some pain involved in the learning curve), but I still keep LMDE around on my old gaming rig and on a couple other computers of mine.
I'm assuming they mean those with 401k's or other managed retirement accounts.
Transliteration of the Russian vs Ukranian (the one used in the article) iirc.