I would say yes, because as is the real niche communities dont have the size for larger discussions.
Mainstream communities e.g. about global news already have a decent size. And in many ways it doesn’t make much of a qualitative difference if there are 500 or 10.000 predictable comments. But many smaller communities are still mostly propped up by a few power users providing the majority of content which is not ideal for many reasons.
They don’t learn the lesson, because they don’t want to. And your examples imo show the problem.
forgiving debts, pardoning marinuana offences
These are not solutions, they are bandaids that like a drug keep you dependent on politicians repeating them again and again. Which of course is nice when your only goal is to get relected, but longterm that magic wears off.
That might certainly be one factor, but my intuition is that the primary driver is still todays diet. Things like soda drinks that let you consume teaspoons of pure sugar in an instant without appropriate feedback simply didn’t exist in the past.
This actually is a hard question. I assume it needs to be an industry that is small, doesn’t have huge margins and probably is primarily manual labour.
Maybe something like blacksmithing?
At that length it seems more aimed towards business trips rather than tourists.
Mini PCs with a n100 or used office PCs are probably not that much more expensive and a much better alternative, if your goal is to run windows on them and you don’t already have the Raspberry Pi lying around.