Does it need to be attached, or would a Bluetooth headset meet your needs?

I think it depends on the humans. Personally, I find online interactions more comfortable than in-person ones, most of the time. In-person interactions exhaust me, if they aren't with the small handful of people with whom I'm most comfortable, so I can really only take them in short doses. I can chat online without any such issues, so if I were lonely, a companion A.I. that could carry on actual conversations might really help, even if it isn't a 1:1 replacement for human interaction.

I'm aware that I am probably not representative of the majority of people, but I doubt I'm the only one who feels the way I do, so there could be a place for this sort of thing, where it could do some actual good.

This is a rough situation, one I've personally dealt with more than once as well. Personally, the best way I've found to deal with it is to be a little less direct than my natural tendency would dictate. I proposed a section of our wiki dedicated to proposed improvements to our systems. Everyone was okay with this idea, so I then took the time to put a detailed description of my solution there. Eventually, it did get picked up and implemented.

I think it might be a little myopic to say that Jira and Confluence are agile. They are tools, nothing more. Using them as an integral part of agile development may indeed be part of the problem, but that isn't the only way to use them. I personally use Jira as a task list with configuration options, and Confluence as an internal wiki. Neither of those require an agile development style.

Personally, I tend to focus more on what software I want to install, and what version of that software would work best for me. Only after that do I consider from where to get it. As an example, when I wanted to install a PostgreSQL server instance, I considered the version I wanted, checked my distro's main repository, and ultimately decided to install the official PostgreSQL repository.

Short answer, I choose the repos that offer the software I want.

CTEs can be useful, particularly in PostgreSQL, where there are writable CTEs, but a lot of the time, I prefer using temp tables over CTEs, as they often perform better for larger datasets. I think one of my favorite constructs is window functions. I've found many uses for them, over the years.