Hi Daniel,
I'm not sure whether you are asking questions per se, but I'll treat this as though you are and try to offer suggestions. First, I agree the Baez columns were fascinating. So if you propose to create an index I would hope people in the mathematical physics community would be appreciative. This could be approached via an LLM-based method. Other ways might involve creating a word-frequency matrix (for which there are numerous variants) and then operating on that matrix e.g. via dimension reduction to try to cluster and/or categorize subsets of articles. I realize this outline is a bit tentative, but it's all I have to offer at this point.
You bring up Cloud credits. I am fairly sure no decreases were made that would only apply to you; if any such change occurred it would apply to a much larger group.
I cannot advise on the relative merits of development with Wolfram platform resources vs Python. I simply lack the experience.
For non-Cloud-based work there is the home desktop version to consider:
https://www.wolfram.com/mathematica/pricing/home-hobby/
I do not (and indeed cannot) speak for my employer in terms of addressing licensing particulars. It occurs to me though that one is perhaps at the level of hobbyist if revenue generated is not adequate to consider a professional version license.
