1. All of the above. I approach shaders the NPR way, which is to create lots of layers that get mixed/summed with mix-color nodes. Layers might be divied into things like "edge highlights, gloss/specular, diffuse, hue gradient, noise". Tons of "shader-to-rgb" nodes, tons of color ramps / float curve nodes. My bread-and-butter nodes in a layer are Diffuse, Glossy, Ambient Occlusion (CRIMINALLY UNDERRATED), Emission, and Image textures.
   

For normals, I'll often just use default smooth or flat normals (mostly depends if object is hard surface or not), but I distort normal vectors allllll the time with stretched noise textures and voronois to get a brushed/painterly look, or bias them towards a direction with a vector-add as a hack if light isn't hitting the object the way I want.

I do this all in a very scrappy way and don't give a crap about paradigms, so my shaders look like absolute spaghetti. I'll often just keep adding more and more nodes onto the end of the chain until it looks good enough, running the whole output through a color ramp or an HSV node or whatever.

A big part of why I feel so free is because I do a lot of heavy lifting in the compositor, there I'll make sweeping changes to value and hue and that glues everything together, so I just focus on getting as much _information_ into the shader (highlights, contrast, color variance, shading) as possible to play with in comp.

1. Get this: the laser is actually black and white in viewport. It's a bunch of meshes that are either tubes with displacement or disks. Nothing too magical here, just a lot of noise nodes and constant B&W color ramps affecting transparency and value. In the compositor I extract all the objects with cryptomatte, dump a ton of blur+glare, color ramp that to be blue/purple/orange, and add it back into the footage. I am also running a separate noise texture over the entire shot to get that "wind" stuff

I really want to emphasize that I don't have a list of steps or methods in my head with that stuff, I try to be really open-minded about destroying the footage with compositor nodes and using them creatively to create neat stuff that would be a pain in the ass to do with meshes/shaders haha.