All depends on what kind of company you work for.

Lage corporations: no chance they would pay your salary in BTC, there's just too much bureaucratic headache
Small, nimble, international startups: hell yes (quite common actually, based on my knowledge)

Getting your salary paid in BTC is especially convenient if you are a nomadic individual or one who resides abroad. Depending on where you live, if you can get paid a portion of your salary in BTC from an employer in another country, that should technically qualify as income from abroad which is not taxed in many countries (or, of course, if you get paid discretely it's even better).

Personally I think it's great to get paid in BTC as that skips the headaches in dealing with FX and banks, etc. It also automatically helps you save/hodl money. If you work for a distributed tech startup or crypto startup, you should definitely ask for BTC salary payment!

I honestly don't see much different between the new DCEP and the "traditional" Alipay/WeChat digital fiat, maybe the only thing is with the DCEP the database will be totally centrally controlled by the PBOC. In other words, China's new "digital yuan" will be a more centralized fiat that will give the party more control/transparency over taxation and capital flows. I have no doubt that the DCEP is part of a wider strategy (along with 5G like some have mentioned) to stake China's hegemony on global currency marketshare and informational control, starting with the financially weak Belt & Road countries. But anyway, at the moment I don't see much advantage compared to existing fiat, and I cannot see anyone in their right mind picking the Chinese DCEP as a reserve currency over the USD.

No way in hell this will replace bitcoin though  Bitcoin is exactly the counter measure to these centralized fiats. The more centralized these digital fiats become, the less willing will the rich be holding them.

I recommend getting your bitcoin news from Twitter. Follow the right people and you will get concise and fast information, much more efficient than reading winded and agenda-driven pieces from CoinDesk. Of course, this is as long as you can stand the toxicity. 

I got excited thinking it would be in the free state of Liberland, but Lithuania is nice too.   Following.

I stick to the large top 10 exchanges with (relatively) real volume: Bitstamp, Kraken, Bitfinex, Binance, Bittrex. I only use an exchange like HitBTC if there is some coin that I need to buy/sell which isn't listed on the major ones.

I'd be careful with most of the other small/medium exchanges -- they are just not reliable enough. You all see what happened with Cryptopia recently. Remember that during the frenzy of 2017 Cryptopia was one of the most popular exchanges for people to buy microcaps... 1.5 years later and it's gone.