I suddenly realize the only thing I use the dock for is to right-click the trash to empty it.

How do you empty the trash? It's never even occurred to me... how do you get to the trash except via the dock?

Replying to myself:

Good news: there's a command under the Finder menu (to the left of File) "Empty Trash..."

Bad news: there's no obvious easy way to view the contents of the Trash before emptying it, without clicking on it in the dock. It's not under "Go", you can't add it to the sidebar either with Settings or by dragging it, and various instructions to navigate to "~/.Trash" don't work in Sequoia.

Good news: But you can add it to the sidebar by opening the Trash and using File > Add to Sidebar. And it shows up with its nice custom trash icon.

IIRC Finder has an option to delete files from the Trash 30 days after they're put there. I just enable that option and forget about the Trash completely.

You clearly aren't regularly deleting tens of gigabytes of files at a time... ;)

You can generally permanently delete with one action - but be sure you want to!

GUI: select item(s) and Option-Command-Delete

Command-line: rm -rf folder-or-file-path (or srm to securely remove)

I empty the trash with command-shift-backspace. I use the dock icon to open it, but I think there’s an entry in the Go menu

It's in the File menu of the Finder, towards the bottom.

I have all popup and sound notifications off and from time to time i check the unread message count badges on the dock icons :)