That isn’t the reason most of us use Linux, and even if it were, the “administration vs. creatives” divide probably goes back to Ancient Egypt, if not further. But fight it if you want to. I give it six months before you burn out, and the division in question will still be there, and some people will still be basing their identities around it. (I mean, what do you think is a good thing to base your identity around? Your degree of appreciation for Taylor Swift? 'Cause I think you’d find that one is a lot more common.)
As a wild guess, try completely specifying the IP address in your fstab instead of relying on a wildcard. Wouldn’t be the first time there was a slight difference in how a marginal feature like that worked in different contexts.
If the Chromebook is your property, you can do whatever you want with it, and it’s unlikely that anyone will notice or care. I assume you’re in the US, since you appear to be worried about DMCA encryption-related provisions. Don’t be. Even if it were 100% guaranteed illegal with all necessary precedents, Google has better things to do with its time than track down individual jailbroken Chromebooks. It isn’t like you’re going to be selling them in quantity or using them to facilitate ransomeware attacks or something.
However, I’d invest in a used laptop instead, since it’s likely to have more internal storage even if it lacks the !!shiny!! factor. Chromebooks are meant to store as little as possible locally, and that isn’t how a normal Linux works. I suspect you’d start to get data claustrophobia pretty quickly.
Aqualung—does the small set of things I need it to, and is content to operate on files and directories rather than force the creation of a “music library” that doesn’t in any way match how I categorize my music (although if you actually want a music library, it can do that). Only issue is that it’s still GTK2, which may become a problem within the next few years.
More recommendations mean more people using the hardware. More people using the hardware means more testing. More testing means more people learning and documenting how to fix problems. So in that sense, statements like that actually do become true over time regardless of their truth values at the beginning.