I've been reading up on photography related things and a few things slowly start to become clear to me:

• a lot of people don't know what they are talking about or are actively gatekeeping by making things more complicated than they are. I don't understand things either, but I'm getting at the level that I'm starting to recognise the hot air
• photographers must have very strong arms. That stuff is heavy!
• all this stuff about 'equivalent focal length' only relates to how far back you need to walk with a less expensive camera to get the same subject in the frame as with a top-end camera. It, and distance itself, have nothing to do with the perspective distortion everyone talks about; that's dependent on the actual focal length
• the so called flattering effect of focal lengths above 80mm in portrait photography is because people's noses don't appear to be so big (due to the perspective distortion) (selfies on smartphones do the opposite)

I currently have an old cumbersome camera with a crop factor of 4 (so I need to walk very far back, normal factor is 1.6, or 1) and a non-interchangeable lens with 26x zoom (it's comically long). Looking at options to do something new.