Well, for nontechnical people #3 is already the standard practice, since outside of STEM it's common to essentially never do any math, we pay our taxes with app

Well, for nontechnical people #3 is already the standard practice, since outside of STEM it's common to essentially never do any math, we pay our taxes with apps and many don't "budget" so much as "Spend almost nothing on anything that isn't essential", and even if we did budget, we'd use Excel. #3 also mostly works in programming, where common algorithms are black boxes, but it completely fails the moment you want to get a job that needs true understanding. Seems like we need an approach that actually gives people a sense of trust that the mostly useless times tables and trigonometry problems they learn will someday help them work at Google or read a scientific paper, so people have the motivation to avoid getting behind in the first place.