Long-term custom ROM user here.

Regarding security: as always, it depends on your threat model. If you fear a government actor getting access to your phone, a locked bootloader won’t slow them down.

Regarding privacy: I’ve had both VPN logs and external Wireshark running against traffic going in&out of my custom ROM phones & sometimes I still do it for fun. If you know what you’re getting into (e.g. LoS still using some Google services) then a Custom ROM usually holds far fewer surprises than some questionable OEM ROM (and which is terrifyingly scarce regarding changelogs while still having OTA update power).

tl;dr: stick with well-known ROMs & you get … not the best of both worlds … but a “good enough” of both worlds.

As a parent, EVERY kid feels like your kid. This made me cry.

I’m glad to hear it’s not an issue in your experience / industry.

German here: I have yet to witness these “European-style” vacations mentioned in the post title.

Most workplaces seem to frown at people taking >2 consecutive weeks of vacation, esp. if they don’t have kids and do it in main travel season / during school holidays. Handing in ~3 weeks of holidays often at least needs some kind of explanation to the team-lead, e.g. “I have school kids who have their summer holidays and we need to keep them busy until school starts again.”

I have yet to see a single company going easy on someone saying “I’ll be off all of August KTHXBYE”.