I dont have a proper answer to 1 other than range proofs prove that the amount of monero sent is a posative number. If it were able to be negative it would cause inflation through that because a small negative number becomes like 2^62. Luke Parker might be better able to answer that one though.
As for 2, not everyone needs to run a node. Hell, Hijacking Bitcoin by Roger Ver makes good arguements that even Satoshi thought btc nodes would be run in data centers. There absolutely must be a lot of nodes but "lot" is not well defined. Monero currently has ~18000 nodes so seems well decentralized. Node requirements seem well tuned to grow slower than bandwidth, cpu, storage, etc which would keep it in the bounds of usability. A pruned Monero node is ~80gb and perfectly fine for the average person to run for family and friends or even small communities.
Hard forks are not "easy" to roll out, they still take years of debate and work. They are "easier" for sure because technology changes as time moves on. Take SMTP as an example, it has no sort of encryption and cannot be updated at all because it is far to difficult. It is stuck in amber and will eventually have to be abandoned if we ever want true email encryption. Technology must be able to evolve over time as long as that process is slow and well thought out.
As for the exchanges thing, the Monero community celebrates every single time Monero is delisted from a centralized exchange, because that means you have to acquire it in a decentralized manner by earning it from a job, selling an item for it, buying it on a decentralized, non-custodial exchange, etc. Governments pressure exchanges to remove it because it actually works as peer to peer digital cash that they can't spy on and they are incredibly afraid of it. AI makes it trivial to do chain analysis on blockchains such as Bitcoin. It was easy enough before, but now it just becomes even easier. And they cannot do that with Monero.
I think you need to ask yourself why you are interested in Bitcoin. If you are interested in it for the number go up, that's one thing. But if you are interested in it for peer to peer digital cash that does not require the system that oppresses you, that's a whole different story.
