I had the same experience as many here. Great place to start out and if you don’t need or want more control then it’s perfect. I ended up on unraid and mostly use docker for apps.

No. The far more likely way to handle it is with flocculation/coagulation since plants are already set up to support this.

Edit: the quick and dirty overview: shit water comes in. Chlorine and other chemicals are added to the water which kills the bad stuff. Polymers are added to the water which binds to the chlorine, causing chunks. Chunks removed. Water discharged. You can change the polymers used to bind specifically to which pollutant is coming in.

That part of the process is called flocculation. Using it to add polymers that have additional capability (like removing microplastic) is where you’d want to do it. The cost is the polymer which would be some sort of reasonable, not rebuilding every plant that exists to boil water.

Check out the video on the flocculation page. Does a great job of showing how floc works.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flocculation

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wastewater_treatment&wprov=rarw1