If you do GPU-based software rendering, I would highly advice using RT instead of raster for visibility. It's simpler and likely also faster. But HW acceleration there also beats compute, in both, although you can achieve good results without acceleration too.

And even with GPU compute, you benefit from HW acceleration with the HW texture unit.

I'd very much argue against somebody making game development their career, at least from job security grounds. But graphics programming is different.

For learning graphics programming, in my opinion, writing software renderers is much more enjoyable path. Code is less, the code you write touches fundamental and not boilerplate. Downside is that code will be slower as you will lose HW acceleration.

Now, of course reference counting can be used as a part of a garbage collector. But that doesn't mean any language that allows you to implement reference counting as a library, is a garbage-collected language.

If the definition of a word/concept does not match how the word is used in real life, the definition is wrong. After all, semantics is about common understanding of concepts. If your definition of a word doesn't match how it's used, using that definition is not beneficial to use.

But getting a portable AC unit is relatively simple, they definitely don't need "re-engineering the environment". Sadly most portable AC's here are single-hose units which are not great. They are cheap though with prices similar to yours, cheapest at around €200. Mini-split systems are very common though as a retrofit: On apartments you can almost always put the outside unit on the balcony.