No idea, Ethereum was an intriguing experiment for the first few years, but it’s seemed like a dead end for a while now

Since it's deterministic, you can get a good estimate (in fact exact as long as you are not front-run) by simulating the execution locally before submitting it. All major wallets do this.

In addition to what 3np said, you can use Flashbots as your RPC node, and your transaction won't be submitted if it's going to fail.

Minor note, the reason for charging for failed transactions is to prevent abuse of network resources, don't want someone submitting millions of bogus transactions to DOS the network.

That's a good reason, still need people to pay for scarce resources, just a shame that there's no mechanism to pick up where you left off.

Thanks for the tip about flashbots, never heard of it