I upvote any option that has a “buy outright” baked in.

You are easy to satisfy.

Once upon a time, we complained about undependable applications that, although installed on a computer, dared to "phone home".

Before that, we complained about undependable applications that, while not fucking around with remote servers, employed invasive and annoying anti-piracy measures.

I don’t love that Lightworks phones home, but FWIW, Lightworks’ support has been very good when I have contacted. They were very helpful when I needed to migrate a license when I had to swap to another computer.

This might not seem like much but that has been something I have struggled with other companies over.

I haven't personally used it much, except for a very simple cut but I have heard very good things about KDENLive too.

I've used KDENLive and it's about as comparable to Resolve or Lightworks as Windows Movie Maker is to Premiere.

I think you need to distinguish between classes of users, e.g. home consumers needing some basic editing features vs. a hollywood studio, and the spectrum in between.

I use KDENLive a lot and I find it to be an excellent product. Not perfect, but well thought out and powerful. Documentation I give a C grade too. It's awesome that some exists, but it tends to be outdated and frequently omits details about the specific thing needed. On Linux I do recommend using the App Image or Flatpak though as I have run into dependency issues (mainly codecs) when using system packages such as Fedora's.

For a typical user/consumer who just needs a video editor that can do more than just trivial cuts, I think it's an excellent option and it's the one I use and recommend to others. Unless you're looking to do advanced or highly complex products, it can do it all and in a fairly intuitive way. There are also youtube videos and such that demonstrate nearly everything you might need to do so there are plenty of available resources.

I dunno, all the home users I know use Resolve. It's pretty easy to learn Resolve, with their tutorials you can go from "never edited a video" to "able to edit a simple short film" in about a day.