frozen cubes of garlic save a ton of time breaking open cloves
I take issue with that one specifically. Frozen, jarred, canned, tinned or tubed garlic is so much worse than freshly chopped garlic and it really isn't that much of a hassle to peel and chop it.
I'm lazy as shit and use tons of garlic and you just smash it with the broad side of the knife and give it a little slap slap to chop it up and you're done. I've never had non fresh garlic that's anywhere near as good as fresh garlic, same with ginger. Pickled ginger's good too, but it's not the same thing as regular ginger and isn't interchangeable in most recipes.
I'm not even that much of a snob about fresh ingredients, I almost exclusively use refrigerated lemon and lime juice because I don't go through those often enough to keep them fresh and it's 95% there, but garlic is probably the one thing that I refuse to get preprocessed.