It doesn’t matter where you get that passion for getting back into the swing of programming, I’m not far from your age, and truly everything becomes more monotonous over time in this life, and what was once a passion becomes something hard to achieve. In my case, AI helped me handle the tedious part of things and just kept the fun stuff of finding the solution and just tell it how to solve it, and it helps me achieve it much faster than ever before. Keep going and going! Who knows what you’ll achieve tomorrow. Keep the channel open with updates.
Whenever I throw out to the trash any electronic equipment sitting in my attic, sooner more than later is that I will need that equipment. It's Murphy's law.
You should also electrically fix your VAr, i'm not fresh with my electronics knowledge but VAr (Volt-Ampers Reactive) has no effect electrically on equipment (those are waste) because you are billed by the resultant vector of the sum of Watts (work) + VAr (Waste) = Tariff Bill
About your monitoring command:
lsof -w /mnt/* | grep /mnt/ | wc -l
Have you taken a look into incrontab, maybe it's more cpu efficient, but i don't know, so you could take a look into it.
I don't know how to translate some specific terms to English, but in certain point of my life, I took a course about "internal customer service" at my job, i generally don't like those kind of subjects, but at that time it was part of my duties, so... I went to the course, the teacher started talking like this: "Everyone of us have an 'access code' to communicate with each other" that grabbed my attention, and then he said something like there are "visual, auditive, and kinesthetic" kinds of people. I discovered then, that I was a visual person and finally at my 33yo totally understood why i do not understand others when they talk to me and try to explain anything. To me, school was very hard. So, maybe this could be one of many many reasons, i hope this help others to investigate more about this subject, and take some extra steps before losing your time trying to explain something to someone using an incorrect communication channel.