None of the early adopters will touch new Google products with a 10 foot pole as they have a high chance of being discontinued.

Committing to any new google products is just asking to be disappointment.
There is no culture of keeping and improving any product anymore, if there ever was.

In the browser you can also visit individual instances and click on communities local and scroll the lists.

Why would you buy a platform, and hen disband it like that?

Fidelity valued its holdings in Reddit at:
May 2023 > $15.4 million
Apr 2023 > $16.6 million
Aug 2021 > $28.2 Million

Can you enlighten me how this works? I would love to be able to zap that modal :) even if its only another resource. I tried what i could find online but it keeps pushing me to the /i/flow/login

When using lemmy in the browser, there are some userscripts that do this.
https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/469273-lemmy-universal-link-switcher

but I would love to see this as sort of default behavior, so that the user indeed does not have to “fight” the system to get it to subscribe properly.

Yeah, I would discuss this with your wife. But it seems you have good reasons to stick to your schedule as much as possible. See where you can compromise to have an evening with the in-laws or something but this should be very manageable if properly agreed with your wife.