Do we live in the same town? That's been my experience exactly, many experiences have required walking briskly before a simple question becomes more than a yes or no answer and explaining why I don't have $20 or a meal on me. The times I do try to buy them a meal I've been lead to the most expensive restaurant nearby (be threw away my meal I got him at Subway).
Anything to keep ourselves comfortable. That's one of the reasons I see that we have representatives - so the population at large doesn't have to bear the burden of doing dirty work.
We then in the same breath complain about government but put forth no effort to fix it.
I may not be in the business (and this is not an ad), but I could likely build the same site in about 30 minutes and charge a tenth of the price to recover the cost of Copilot in VS Code for a year.
Human-built has its place, but it's hard to justify when the price is so much higher for a relatively repetitive task that produces the same results.
I'd like to point you towards Meshtastic [1]. It's off-grid, decentralized text messaging that allows for encryption, and is inexpensive to get into (a basic node is about $30 or less), and don't require a license to operate.
The firmware on these devices is open source (minus proprietary blobs for ESP32 WiFi, etc.) and the community is active. Check the Meshmap [2] to see some nodes that have made their location public in your area.