Agreed, and in specific:

I’d also be inclined to treat posts that are off-topic but have a selection of informative high-effort comments by locking them and sharing them to the appropriate community for further discussion there vs. removing them entirely.

I agree entirely on locking and redirecting. One thing to note is I would encourage users who know of a better home for that post to also recommend it. I have no intention of locking a thread thats tangentially related without a realistic/reasonable place to redirect them to, or I think the effort overall would be counterproductive.

I’d also like to note some good communities in the sidebar that may be helpful, but for example on the hardware side I’m drawing a blank. !hardware@programming.dev is mostly news/kit posts, same with !hardware@lemmy.world. So I’d welcome ideas here as well.