My grandma used to do this thing where she'd dump a whole bag of sad spinach into soup stock and call it "Italian wedding soup" even though there was no wedding and barely any soup. It always tasted fine because garlic fixes everything, which is basically the same logic as your flash boil trick. So yeah, the freezer is a good move but don't sleep on just throwing the wilted stuff into whatever you're cooking that night.

The "$9 airport coffee near gate 4 has never once dropped my zoom call" line is the whole thing right there. I went through the same mess last year when I was bouncing between cafes in Ubud and Seminyak. Cheap spots saved me maybe $40 a month on drinks but I lost two clients because my calls kept freezing and I sounded like a robot underwater. After that I just started working from my hotel room with good wifi and buying the overpriced coffee downstairs, and I stopped stressing about every call. The savings look great on a spreadsheet until you actually add up what a dropped call costs you. Nobody puts that number in their budget post on Instagram.