While you make many valid points, I think it's not reasonable to assume that OP could have avoided all the struggles they had, if they just had informed himself prior to installing. Especially since many of them problems described were probably caused by an unfortunate combination of software/driver issues, a specific hardware setup and certain user expectations.
I doubt that watching tech YouTubers or similar would have helped much.
I do have Ctrl under ä (which would be the semicolon key on US layout, I think). Interestingly, on Mac (with Karabiner) it caused regular mistypes when typing fast, even after a year. On my 12 year old Thinkpad (Linux with keyd) however, I've never found the overloading to be an issue.
I'll probably give the layout in the article a shot. It sounds interesting.