You can always call a a taxi if its urgent.
For the first, if you can't find a job where starting 10 minutes later is not something you can negotiate, then probably you working at a low end job, in that case you shouldn't spend your hard earned money on car payments and gas anyway.
Cars are obviously more convenient, but also more expensive and less environment friendly. Noone force anyone to give up your convenience so no need to go defensive, just consider it as an option for all the good reasons.
I agree with the first part, but knowing about bootloader and flashing rom to a new phone is hackerman level, not a regular tech-savvy user.
New generations having hacking skills is more like a cyberpunk novel, reality is lower attention spans, worst reading skills and over-simplified UIs. People gravitate to the simpler way.