I have the same rule for Gaelic.

It’s all of the above and then some. A good read on the subject is John McWhorter’s “Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue.” It’s intended for a non-technical/popular audience and doesn’t get too deep into the weeds so you don’t need a degree in linguistics to follow it.

This is not unique to English.

The real kicker is phrasal verbs. You can have alright conversational English without needing most of these “advanced” grammatical features, which is a big part of why English has a reputation of being easier to learn in school than other European languages like German or Dutch.

It’s when you’re faced with a vocabulary list like “get up”, “get on”/“get off”, “get in”/“get out”, “get through”, “get on”/“get along”, “get by”, “get across”, “get away with”, “get back”, and a myriad of other which in your native language each get a dedicated verb that you realize that English is not simpler, the complexity is just further up the road.

Also fun fact, if your native language is French, you can cheat and never use most of those, while accidentally using a much more formal/elevated register, because English has a habit of stealing French words when it wants to sound fancy.
“Get in” = enter (entrer), “Get through” = traverse (traverser), “Get by” = survive (survivre), “get across” ~ communicate (communiquer), “get back” = return (retourner).

German also does this. I think a good 20% of all verbs are just variations of “ziehen” (to pull).

Gendered articles, like all things relating to grammatical gender, can be useful to reduce ambiguity and therefore increase information density/redundancy. They’re basically the Roman languages’ way of retaining the usefulness of Latin cases without actual grammatical cases.

“Ami” and “amie” are homophones in French (with some accents you might see /ami/ vs /ami:/, but in casual speech you’d likely miss it anyway). However “un ami” is different from “une amie”.

So in French you’d say “hier je suis sorti avec une amie” which, to convey the same level of detail in English, requires a translation like “yesterday I went out with a female friend”.

I remember a study that gendered articles slightly increase understandibility among native speakers.

I’m still smiling at this.