Is the prevailing advice still not to bother with self-hosting email?

Unfortunately, yes. Here’s a fantastic blog post from someone who gave up on self-hosting last year due to the vast number of problems with self-hosting. The post also does a great job at pointing out why the death of self-hosting email is so bad in general, but still regrettably concludes that it isn’t worth it in any scenario right now.

Even as an embedded C developer I use “idx” and “count” instead of “i”. Not just because I’m a member of the “slightly longer but more descriptive names are better” gang, but also for searchability. If I’m trying to track down where an array is accessed in a loop, for example, “idx” is more likely to take me only to the results I’m looking for and not also the “i” in int8_t or whatever.

Shit, Microsoft docs are better than most other large companies with broadly used software even, not just random undocumented BS from smaller companies and products. In my experience, Microsoft’s Xamarin docs are somehow often a better guide for Android development than Google’s docs (good god are the official Android docs some of the hottest garbage that a company of Google’s size and talent could put out), and I’ve yet to find a better general reference for any language or library than Microsoft’s .NET documentation. I’ve seen a lot of people dunk on it for it’s verbosity and/or “example bloat” but I love the length of their docs for breaking down different use-cases and giving examples of each, along with potential misuses and recommended alternatives.

That said, they do still have some garbage docs (like what OP is pointing out), but my general experience with their docs, especially for their larger/more mainstream products, has been surprisingly positive.

Am I missing a reason for such a change?

They wanted to fall in line with what all the Chromium-based browsers do.

That said, there is a way to get it to start asking you what to do with files again (though I don’t remember how), but it still always saves the file to your Downloads folder (because that’s what Chromium-based browsers do) which there is no option to change yet as far as I’m aware. To be honest, I’m not sure they ever will implement that as a feature, but I really hope they do because I hate having to go manually cleaning out my downloads when just letting me dump them to a temp dir would make life so much easier.