you are solid with the exception of needing a tax advisor(it’s actually super simple if you are a typical w2 worker), and that the IRS is not in kahoots with the tax companies, they actually were up until Trump became president working on a free tax submission system that didn’t require you to put any values in, because trying to get anywhere with passing anything better was met with massive lobbying from those tax companies.

Of course trump fired the entire dev team working on it almost immediatly, but it’s still up /for now/ just likely isn’t going to be worked on anymore