That's not a design choice made by a designer. That's a project lead or marketing deciding on how to implement more enshitification into a product.
I am aware of fairphone. It would be good if more phones follow their example. One thing that bothers me with them is that they don't have the latest high end processors and tend to lag a lot after a couple of years.
For presentations she can check out Penpot. It's web based, mainly for UI design, but super easy to use. Also FOSS.
Isn't syncthing discontinued? Meaning not maintained anymore? I use Filen which is a cloud service, but it's not the best.
Having lived in quite a few countries now, it's all about who you know. It's extremely hard to get a job when you don't have a network.
What's Wero?