I got sort of an inverse impression of Downton Abbey. For me, it was about inevitable change, since practically every single truth held by the most conservative characters is at some point bent or entirely overturned, often by themselves. Literally all of the gentry are huge hypocrites.

It also spends a good amount of time creating parallels in the lives of the different classes that, for me, underscored how there was nothing fundamentally special about the aristocracy besides their wealth. Wealth that they never earned and only held onto because a peasant Irish driver who banged their daughter forcibly removed their heads from their assess.

It just doesn’t seek to accomplish all this by making the upper class into Disney villains, since that’s rarely how people actually are. But I never got the impression the show was trying to say this is how things should have or had to have been.

batshit insane ultra conservatism (the Death Eaters)

Death Eaters are revolutionary wizard supremacists.

There are multiple mentions that electronics ALLWAYS malfunctions in presence of magic.

I don’t think there’s actually any such mention. There’s several mentions about how “muggle technology doesn’t work in the Hogwarts grounds”, but there’s no mention of electronics going haywire when someone is doing magic outside of hogwarts, imo?

Please do correct me if I just remember wrong.

And even just turning out lights is something that is apparently not that simple to do. Aside from Peruvian instant darkness powder — which doesn’t exactly snuff out lights, but covers them in darkness — the only thing to affect lights is Dumbledore’s deluminator. And he’s a magical genius.

My point being even turning off the lights is challenging. Muggle tech may not work in Hogwarts but I don’t recall any mention of magic fucking up tech unless it’s magic specifically meant to fuck up tech. Hogwarts is just like such a protracted and magical place that “muggle tech doesn’t work” but even that’s kind of a silly overarching statement that’s easy to challenge. Plumbing is technically muggle tech. It works. Wouldn’t ball point pens work as well? I imagine those would be pretty highly valued commodities. I think muggle borns could easily flog biros for at least a galleon a piece. Which the muggleborn could then go and exchange for the value of the gold, getting probably hundreds of pound for a galleon.

Endless money glitch.

But yeah at least pens would work I’d argue. Something like calculators is easy to see being fucked by some ambient magic fields, but pens? Nah.

Magic could operate differently from electromagnetism, but still interfere, such as with quantum effects. Inference doesn’t need to go both ways.

I thought about writing a magic setting with fairly hard justification for magic, and in my world, you’d control individual atoms and combine them to get the effects you want. You’d do this by gaining the respect of or instilling fear into atoms so they’d do your bidding. Spoken spells are more like tricks taught to dogs than having any power of their own, and the power derives from the respect or fear the atoms have for the caster. This explains why some wizards/witches are more powerful than others, and why learning isn’t necessarily the best way to get more powerful. The strongest magic users in my world spend a lot of time meditating, meaning communing with the target group of atoms.

The inner workings of atoms is poorly understood, so I think there’s room to insert some form of sentience.

Say for the example you have a system where a monotheistic god sometimes alters reality when prayed to by a devout follower. There are no measurable or manipulatable components, as the god can respond entirely differently tomorrow.

That’s still nowhere near unexplainable enough to be impossible to study. You’ve described the god’s behaviour as “sometimes alters reality when prayed to by a devout follower” - if it’s consistent enough for this statement to make sense, that’s already a lot to study. Is there a correlation between particular prayers and miracles? Are particular mental states helpful? Are various traits make someone more likely to produce a miracle? Are there drugs that affect it? What are the limits to a miracle? Is there patterns in the time intervals between miracles? And so on, and so forth. A world with such a magic system, if you want it to be realistic, should have had an entire history of people studying these and many other things.

And honestly, the mystery of an unexplainable magic system is often what makes it magic.

Eh. It’s sometimes fun to read stories like that (one better have fun, since most stories are like that!), but they’re… stories about worlds where there isn’t a single human with common sense or intelligence. Not just in the story itself, but in the world’s entire history, because the author didn’t realise that “people trying to seriously explore the laws of their world” is a thing that necessarily happens in realistic worlds, much like it happens in ours.