that is only if you want it to be standard.
unfortunately 90% of the things we read on forums, SE, documentation,... that say "must be" are talking about standard rules.
SCRIPT_VERIFY_SIGPUSHONLY  flag is only added to standard rules and doesn't exist during block verification.

to test this you have to mine the block yourself!

the transaction hash will change but it won't make the transaction invalid. because the transaction you are verifying is not using its own hash.

that is what malleability is. fiddling around with the transaction scripts to change its hash and cause troubles. most of the cases are already fixed and can no longer happen. they are explained in BIP-62.
for example OP_CHECKMULTISIG(VERIFY) OPs pop an extra item from the stack and is ignored so it could be anything. an attacker could easily change it to any other push and create any number of still valid transactions each with a different hash. with SegWit softfork this can no longer happen. the flag is SCRIPT_VERIFY_NULLDUMMY which you can see is used during verification too.

i should also mention that all bitcoin core nodes reject all non-standard transactions so malleability is not a problem because it is practically impossible to perform.

since the difficulty is defined as an integer comparison not a "leading zero count" thing, if you want to compute the probability of finding a block at first attempt then you must find the probability of finding a number that is in range from 0 to target from a bigger range of numbers that go from 0 to 2^256.
and if i'm not mistaken that probability is calculated by dividing target by 2^256.

it is not "string" length despite what the wiki says, it is byte length and what i meant was that you can change the 2 initial data that are being pushed to the stack to be literary anything. then you can also add some other garbage code there for example the second thing you posted can be modified to this that even has an OP_CHECKSIG inside and it still passes:
and it still has nothing to do with breaking the redeem script

well the moment you posted the link to that address here (the first line of this topic) that disguise stopped working.

you found one case of transaction malleability.
it doesn't matter what you place before your redeem script, it can even be empty or it can contain lots of OP codes, it still evaluates the same.
by the way it has nothing to do with "breaking the redeem script".

you are probably right but only because it is "testnet" and it has no value. doing the same on mainnet would surely lead to an immediate double spending of the same coins by multiple transactions, more if the value is high (like 0.1BTC which is worth $1100+).

well there is no signature involved anywhere in your transaction as there is no OP_CHECK(MULTI)SIG(VERIFY) OP codes anywhere in it. we are talking about an arbitrary script that anyone can spend and is also revealed already.

i don't know if you don't know the meaning of the word "break" or just misusing it but this is not what "breaking" means. breaking would be if and only if the only thing that was revealed were the hash of the script and nothing else.
as i said there is absolutely no way of breaking it when it is only the hash. but when you have already revealed the script here (which anyone can spend) all it takes is a copy and paste of it into a new transaction spending the new output(s).

first of all how in the word do you even claim to know when someone who is selling bitcoin has bought his coins at? it is not like there is a flag on top of their trades shouting their buy price to the world.

secondly your whole statement about people are only selling on bitfinex (Not many try to buy on Bitfinex, but many try to sell on Bitfinex) makes zero sense!
i hope you realize that in any market when someone sells 1 bitcoin another person has to buy 1 bitcoin! you can't say there are more sellers than buyers. specially when price on Bitfinex is the same as everywhere else.

well unless you consider cheating to be a "solution", it is not possible to break something like this even if you knew the number of OP codes inside the script or knew the ballpark of their type. it contains 14 OP codes that are never used (ROT, SWAP, NIP, SIZE, ...) and 2 random data pushes!

it is the goold old FOMO that we have been expecting to happen for a couple of weeks. each time bitcoin tested the $10k resistance and didn't break it and filled the pockets of the accumulators as the panic sellers panic sold, the upcoming FOMO became stronger.
and without any surprise as the $10k was broken a surge of buyers rushed to exchanges and started a panic buying hence the jump to that high level in a very short time. in fact i was even expecting to see $13k+ as i mentioned it multiple times before but still $12.2k is still close.

no.
people have been using digital form of payment for a long time now even without COVID-19 pandemic. in fact usage of physical cash has been very little in most places in the world.
with the pandemic they may have moved more towards digital payments but not towards bitcoin and decentralized money. bitcoin still needs adoption (merchants accepting it, employers paying salaries in it,...) before we can see people move towards bitcoin.
other cryptocurrencies are useless anyways so there is nothing there to go to in first place!

are they really upgrading their scammy methods too?
i honestly haven't seen any new method of scamming people for a very long time. it has been the same thing but it gets easier and they keep changing the name of it. for example they were scamming using ICOs and then changed the name to IEO and did the same scam all over again under the new name then changed it a couple of times. and nowadays with the latest name (DeFi) they are scamming all the same.

the way you have been painting your imaginary doomsday scenario you are also unknowingly contradicting yourself here because if such scenarios took place then everything is going to turn into shit. your "business" will also go under, specially when it is new and small. and your "land" is also useless unless it is huge  you plan on planting potatoes in it and take the food market with it during the "doomsday"

it was not a crash bro, it is was drop and a small one too. in the past couple of days we have seen price go from $9200 to $11000 and i call that a big rise.
in fact the more accurate term to use is "correction" because this is exactly what this recent drop was. and it shows the healthy rise that we are having and signals the upcoming rises that will follow.

pump and dump is a form of manipulation and as any manipulation goes, they are hardly predictable because they are not natural market movements. of course there are always signs on the charts but i have never seen moving average work well in predicting a pump and dump.

think about it this way, if it were this simple to predict an unpredictable thing called pump then every newbie with a bot would have been super rich by now!

it seems to me that when you add 64*(58^34) to go to the next value and check the addition result, you are skipping a lot of values in between (the jump) and i am trying to figure out how can we be sure there isn't any other valid values in that skipped space to check.

i have 2 problems with your method.
1) you skipped over explaining how you came up with 64 when you made the jump in 64*(58^34). looking at the binary representation of (58^34) i am guessing you were looking for enough bits to leave the 0x01 untouched hence the 6 bit shift.
but here is a question, how do you know that addition of more (58^n) between 1 and 63 is not going to give the same 0x01?
note that i said n and not 34 because the assumption should be that the missing character could be in different positions which brings me to second problem

2) if i understood your method correctly then it can not work in cases when (58^n) doesn't even change 0x01 at the end. for example the following key since you can no longer make any jumps:
L5E______YaSudiozVRzTqLcHLNDoVn7H5HSfM9BAN6tMJX8oTWz6

i personally don't like speculating like this too much focusing on the past performance but if we were to do it, last halving was mid 2016 and the bull run started in 2016 and ATH was in 2017.
this halving was in mid 2020 and it should end up with ATH in 2021 not 2022!

so far the trend feels the same with the huge drop of the nearly same size as 2015, the recovery that slowly followed and now we are in beginning of 2017 where the rises has to start.

your question is asked in a strange way but it is already answered by achow101 in the first line of his comment.
in other words, and a correct term, you can create a bech32 address from the hash of a script which would make the resulting address of type P2WSH and that hash (unlike the hash used in P2SH) is a single SHA256.

so to expand:
this route will make a P2WPKH and makes the output unspendable^why?.
the correct route is this:

^why? because that is how the protocol works. when the script interpreter sees OP_0 followed by 20 bytes (which is the same as short bech32 address you created) it expects a P2WPKH script and a single signature and single public key (2 items) in witness stack not a script. if you provide OP_1 it fails right away because your witness stack has only 1 item instead of 2 and if it tries converting 0x52 to a public key it obviously fails.

luckily i live in a country that has no laws against using or investing in bitcoin so i never faced the problems you have struggled with but at the same time i never liked the idea of filling KYC forms in an exchange that is going to get hacked sooner or later. i am already worried about using the exchange itself with my precious bitcoins as it is, i don't want to give them any more things they can lose or worse sell!
luckily i mostly make investment in bitcoin, which means buying it when there is a dip or price is low and for that i choose P2P trades. throughout the years i have found trusted people whom i trade with semi-regularly.

it can actually be a very viable option. look at why fees spike most of the times, in 90% of the cases the fees spike hard when price has a big rise or a big drop. that means it is the transactions that go to and come out of exchanges that is causing the spike.
now if a good portion of those transactions could go to a second layer then it would solve most of the fee problems. it may not be a complete fix though.

the times like this are usually good for shitcoins. the times that bitcoin price has a big rise in a short time (a couple of days in this case) that causes the shitcoins to dump but then bitcoin stabilizes and that means shitcoins can pump specially since they had that dump.