Yeah, behaviour-wise Lemmy has been going downhill the last years. For me at least it's still way better than Reddit, but it's different for each person. And I think that you're doing the sensible thing here - it's affecting you negatively, so you step back and take a break.
Everytime I post stuff I just end up with an inbox that I’ve got to go through and just get more and more depressed and deflated.
Ah, the "orange icon syndrome". I know how it's like.
Take care.
It's kind of the opposite - the IPA gives you an unambiguous written representation for each sound, while OP is making an unambiguous sound for each letter.
So for example, let's say that you keep misspelling ⟨cache⟩ as ⟨cash⟩. Inside your head you memorise "⟨cache⟩ is spelled like [katʃe]", then next time you need to write the word you'll be less likely to write ⟨cash⟩ instead.