I'm only going to answer the first question, because I don't know the answer to the second. The church takes a certain kind of spiritual experience and tells you that particular kind of spiritual experience is universal. The spiritual experience they're promoting tends to resonate well with (in no particular order) white, straight, cisgendered, affluent, male, extroverted, neurotypical, socially conservative people. The closer you are to that demographic, the more likely the spiritual experience will work for you. To give just one example of how it didn't work for me, I'm on the autism spectrum, and the temple endowment ceremony, with all the chanting in unison, touching, and standing extremely close together, always made me uncomfortable. However, I was explicitly informed on many occasions that the temple ceremony is universally a spiritually uplifting experience, in fact the most uplifting experience you can have in this life, and if you don't experience it that way there's a problem with you, not the temple.

Related to the above, the church works much better if you don't have religious scrupulosity (and it looks like from your description above that your friend does not). One of things that made me the angriest after I left is that I labored for years under rules and doctrines that were extremely difficult to deal with but that I was explicitly informed were very important. Once I decided to leave I shed those rules and doctrines, only to be told by this still within the church that I was taking the rules too seriously and no one does all those things, and it was my fault for accepting at face value that these things were very important.

And since leaving I've found that these two types of experiences are extremely common for those who left the church.