it is not the best troubleshooting method we have, not by a long shot. but it is the easiest one that still is able to solve some (or even most) problems. because of that it is always the first go-to method before trying something more involved like deciphering logs or error codes to try and understand the source of the problem.

i do not agree.

one can make the argument, that e.g. in a flash drive one can always read the voltage of a memory cell and interpret it either as a one or a zero. thus, there is always data on the drive its just "unorganized" , i.e. not containing any meaning, before you intentionally upload a file to the drive.

similarly, if you delete a file usually the pc just assigns those memory cells to be free to be overwritten, but the contents remains unchangend until another file is written ontop of it (this is also the reason why delete files can often be restored using special programms). to truly "delete" the data, you would have to overwrite all the memory cells with a new value. this however does not "destroy" the memory cells but rather assigns a new value to them.

this i very similar to matter. you can convert it from a structured form (e.g. wood) to an unstructured form such as CO2 and other gasses, but the individual atoms remain the same.

however, to really continue this discussion, we would first need to define what exactly "digitla data" means and what it means to destroy data.

it depends. there are two types of compression.

lossless compression has to goal to restore each and every bit exactly, this is needed for things like e.g. program code, word documents or just generally any file which you don't know what the content represents. this type of compression works by finding patterns of bits which are present many times in the file (like e.g. a string of 8 zeros) and assingning them a shorter pattern (e.g. only two zeros).

the other type of compression is lossy compression and is used e.g. for images, video and sound files (like .jpg or .mp3). this works by only keeping the information that is perceptible to humans. in a image that could mean e.g. smoothing edges to be less sharp but only to a degree thats barely noticeably to the human eye. this is also where the wierd effect next to black and white text of memes which have been repostet a lot comes from. see e.g this website

generally lossy comoression is much more powerful than lossless compression, since it does not need to be able to reproduce each bit exactly. it only needs to provide a result which is quite close to the original considering the limits of human perception

can you name an example which you find to be better than Google?

I use duckduckgo for privacy reasons, but the results are always less accurate and useful than googles results in my opinion.