When it comes to personal configuration, I see no good reason not to use lambdas in this case. I also use them a lot when binding keys to simple commands which I don’t want to name.

Also: option 1.

Personally I don’t think use-package is all that useful. Without it, you need to know what should to go inside a with-eval-after-load block (basically, define-key) and what doesn’t. But then again, with use-package I guess you need to decide what is a :config and what is a :init or whatever.

The :ensure keyword is very useful. There should be an equivalent function in package.el but that’s missing AFAIK.

When possible, I think it’s much better to edit the code locally and synchronize it periodically with the remote. This doesn’t need to be clunky, and is an extension of the fact that you need to periodically synchronize buffer contents with their file a.k.a. save them.