It’s way more likely to be the charging cable than the laptop. See if you can borrow one or find a cheap one to test with, both a difference cable and a different power brick.

It’s probably all good. Just charge it up all the way the first time.

I use parallels desktop. It’s kinda pricey but it works great.

If you buy used, make sure you buy one new enough that it uses Apple’s current architecture; you don’t want to buy into an old hardware set that will get increasingly less support as the years go on. It’ll be supported for new software for longer, and (since Macbooks are pretty tough, generally) it might buy you an extra couple of years on the far end.

You also want something with 8GB of RAM or better. If you buy new, you might go for 16 but 8 will be fine for the next several years.

Negative. They’re as resilient as any laptop I have carried. They’ve released the occasional model that sucked (butterfly keyboards, etc) and weren’t trustworthy, but overall Apple’s laptops have kicked ass for most of this century. I have a 13” M2 MacBook Air currently, it lives in my backpack.