1) At least for the lower divisions, yes. I can't speak on Main and above. There's a healthy amount of teams and RGL is honestly way better than UGC. Open as the only real free division is subject to a lot of sandbaggers and people dipping down (with class restrictions) though, so if you care to fight for a top 3 spot be prepared for that.

2) Only Main (and IM if you consider 9:30 and 10:30 to be super late) teams and above scrim super late. If you play in open, typical scrim times are at 8:30 and 9:30 with default match times being 9:30 on wednesdays. On average you will probably finish at around 10:30 so it should give you enough time to get to bed. Official matches with a lot of back and forth, pauses or breaks between halves will cut into your sleeping regiment. So you will probably want to encourage people to ready up, be on time or just grind MGE till you steamroll everyone so you can sleep. If you play on a team that is understanding of your schedule, then if scrims go on for too long or people are too late you can cut it short via a change in the match timer or round limit. You can try scheduling scrims earlier but I cannot say how successful you will be.

3) When Pugchamp died, everyone moved into in-house discord servers. Most are usually private and circle jerky, so you gotta know a guy who knows a guy. Some are public though. You can find a spreadsheet of all pug servers here.

TF2CC is pretty much the prime spot for lower division PUGs at the moment as well as a learning center with question threads and resources. Recently, higher division PUGs up to Main have been introduced if you feel like open PUGs become too easy.

I appreciate the fast response. Another question I forgot to add is if me being busy with other commitments Tuesdays and Thursdays would make me ineligible to play on most teams or if teams have pretty open schedules in the lower divs.

I played on a team while having a schedule that made me unable to play on the standard match dates most of the time, alot of the time the other team is down to reschedule but sometimes it doesn't work, but thankfully most teams are willing to negotiate with rescheduling

I think you mean IM and above? IM almost always plays 930 1030.

I've edited it to be more clear but I wrote it in that way because Main and Advanced players PUG and scrim deep into the night more often than their lower division counter parts (starting past 10 usually). I've never seen an IM team not just drop dead to sleep after a 10:30.

advanced+ doesn't even start till 10, so stuff usually goes till midnight at best

It's somewhat open, especially if people don't have commitments for Highlander (highlander scrim on weekends with Monday being their match day). The vanilla schedule for a team is usually scrimming tues-thursday though. You could find a team that only plays matches or one that does scrim outside of Tuesday / Thursday.

If you can't find a team that fits well, you could also roster as a substitute and play PUGs until you find one that does or your schedule opens up.

How is HL doing these days? Is it worth playing HL or is sixes still considered the far better way to go for NA?

congrats and thanks for coming back and keeping the scene alive

HL players tend to scrim on weekends with default matches on Mondays, so if staying up late on a "school night" isn't an option for you that schedule might work better.

how much would you say you checks notes hate yourself?