If sexually abusing a child is enough to have them put to death, then others will simply kill their victim and dispose of them - the crime has the same penalty after all.
This is an interesting point. The justice system has intentionally designed the punishments in a tiered way to help avoid exactly this. I don’t have any data about its effectiveness, but it seems like a smart idea.
This is a question probably better-suited for one of the Proxmox communities. But, I’ll give it a try.
Regarding your concerns about new SSDs and old VM configs: why not upgrade to PVE8 on the existing hardware? This would seem to mitigate your concerns about PVE8 restoring VMs from a PVE7 system. Still, I wouldn’t expect it to be a problem either way.
Not sure about your TrueNAS question. I wouldn’t expect any issues unless a PVE8 installs brings with it a kernel driver change that is relevant to hardware.
Finally, there are several config files that would be good to capture for backup. Proxmox itself doesn’t have a quick list, but this link has one that looks about right: https://www.hungred.com/how-to/list-of-proxmox-important-configuration-files-directory/