Help for a New(ish) User

Please remove if there's a more dedicated MacOS help sub. I did look.

Work gave me a MacBook Pro M2 to play around with. My daily driver is a Framework running Arch/Hyprland. I'm not in the iEcosystem.

The machine is on Tahoe 26.3.

I thought it would be a fun exercise to get MacOS to behave similarly enough so that I wouldn't have to learn a new set of shortcuts.

I'm having trouble finding a lot of the settings that I would expect to be built into any modern operating system. I did try to Kagi every one of these but couldn't find satisfactory answers for these questions in particular.

Please don't tell me that I'm doing it wrong or that if I want a certain feature that isn't supported I must be some sort of idiot. So many answers on StackExchange are downright toxic when it comes to this.

Note: I do not have an AppleID and I will not be getting an AppleID. An OS should be fully usable without having to have an online account and in the current climate of ICE demanding (and getting) every bit of private information as possible, I don't believe that any company is trustworthy. This is non-negotiable. This also negates any software only available via the App Store.

I do have brew installed.

1. I'd like to be able to install, at a minimum, uBlock on Safari but I cannot find any place to add extensions. I know that Safari supports them, but I feel like I'm taking crazy pills!

2. Is there a way to keep the touch bar on at all times? I can't find an option for this. The problem is that it goes to sleep and if I need to play/pause something or change the volume, it requires two presses which is absolutely maddening when I'm using it as a simple media player.

2a. Is there a way to assign a global hotkey for controlling media? I'm using the Jellyfin Media Player. I went through every keyboard setting that I could find but could not find an entry for media keys. I just want to be able to Command-WhateverKey to play or pause the stream.

3. I use Kitty as my terminal emulator. I'd like to be able to assign a global hotkey to launch a new instance on whichever desktop/monitor that is currently active. I've tried adding a entry in the "App Shortcuts" setting but it doesn't seem to work.

I like having a machine that can run Office apps without needing to go through a browser like I do on my Linux box. But it really feels like I'm fighting the OS at every stage. I can accept the situation if my workflow is incompatible with MacOS. But I know that it's very popular among developers and admins so I really want to make sure that I'm not just being obtuse before I put Asahi on it out of sheer frustration.

Sorry for the wall of text. I spent most of the morning looking up a ton of stuff and these are the things that I couldn't find answers for.

Cheers!