From what I can tell the H20 is an older product that’s been mostly replaced by the Libra 2. I wouldn’t be surprised if Amazon sold at a loss, breaking a kindle out of the Amazon ecosystem is more work than most people will do, so they end up being audible subscribers and buying books from Amazon. Personally I think they’re worth the slightly higher price tag to avoid the headache but ultimately it’s your money

I know this isn’t what you’re asking for but the kobo H2O is what I use and it’s fantastic. It’s not sucked into Amazon’s shitty ecosystem and right out of the box it works for loading pirated content. I get all my books from the zlibrary onion site and you literally drag and drop files into the file folder. It’s e-ink so the battery lasts forever, it gets super bright for outside reading, and it’s waterproof. I can’t speak to modding but I haven’t bought a book since 2020 because of it and I honestly prefer it to most physical books at this point