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As others have mentioned, simply commenting on a blog post does not directly help SEO and if done for the sole purpose of dropping a link it is basically worthless spam.
Leaving a thoughtful, intelligent comment that furthers the conversation started in a post can be a great way to build a connection with the author. If you do this regularly on a site, your chances of securing a future link to your content can be significantly increased.
The answer to this question will depend a bit on how you have your current blog post URL slug set up. If you are using domain.com/category/post-title-here and then change your categories, this will cause 404s (which you can fix by redirecting).
If you are using a domain.com/post-title-here or other option, you will be just fine to clean up, edit and alter your category and tags. I would suggest NoIndexing your tags. The decision of NoIndexing categories will depend on how you plan on using them.
If the site is only a few months old, I strongly suggest fixing this now and setting yourself up for better long term success.
You mention these pages are returning 200 in SEO tools, but would you please share what are these URLs are returning when you Fetch as Googlebot in Google Search Console? Test it in both desktop and mobile versions.
Page Authority is just a marketing metric made by Moz and won't update until they re-run their index, which I believe is still on a ~monthly timeline. Just because Moz says a page temporarily has a PA of 1 doesn't mean Google sees it that way.
If you have a good reason to change a URL structure, feel free to do it as long as you have 301s. Do not change your URL structure for small, un-needed reasons, such as cramming a slightly better KW variation in the URL.
Panguin is a great tool, but it requires you to give up your GA data (or at least it used to). If you want to keep your data private or get info on a site that you don't have GA access to, consider this tool which uses SEMrush traffic data and matches it up with Algo Update dates. http://feinternational.com/website-penalty-indicator/
Tag your URLs with utm tags. Use a consistent naming convention like this.
As Dirk said, this is not a concern. A typical e-commerce site is going to have the same images on product pages, category pages, brand pages, etc. In general, I would recommend using fresh images across your site, but a bit of re-use when it makes sense is not a problem at all.
Can you share some details why you want to "move" the store locator to a subdomain? That makes me think it is already operational in a subfolder at the moment. In general, I would recommend not moving content unless there is a very good reason for it.
Those discrepancies would not concern me, but there are some differences between all the things you list:
Total indexed: 2,360 Search Console - this is likely a reasonably accurate list of the number of pages you have indexed in Google. You could use a tool like URL Profiler to check index status of specific URLs.
About 2,920 results Google search "site:example.com" - site: search is less accurate and will likely return a different number each time you do it, even if it's just moments apart.
Sitemap: 1,229 URLs: these are URLs you added to a sitemap because they are priority pages you want to make sure Google has indexed and hopefully ranked. You control this number.
Screaming Frog Spider: 1,352 URLs - Screaming Frog is going to start on your homepage and crawl the site attempting to discover as many URLs as possible. If you are not linking to a page, SF won't be able to crawl it. Google on the other hand may have old pages, old URL structures or pages that were linked from an external website in their index and they won't forget them.
A really important question is: how many pages do you have that you want to be indexed? Is Google's index bloated with pages that you want to keep out? Figure these things out, and then try to adjust your sitemaps, noindex, robots.txt as needed.
If you are just changing the content a bit based on location, I think canonicalizing them all back to the root page is OK.
If this is redirecting based on translations, you should look into using the hreflang tag. It tells the search engines that there are alternate versions of the page in different languages.
Here are some resources for you.
Once that is in place, each page can canonicalize to itself.
You are sort of in an odd situation. You could tell Google that the "p" parameter is for pagination and they would better understand that. However, the canonical tag usage sort of tells Google that all of your paginated pages are actually duplicates of the first page.
Do not change the URLs unless necessary. The URLs you've described above are perfectly fine. Look at Amazon's URLs to see that it is absolutely OK to not have /product-name-here style URLs.
Typically, if you want to use the Canonical Tag for pagination, you would have it point to a View All style page, such as friendly-url.html&view=all.
If you have too many products/pages in the pagination series, you might want to consider removing the canonical tag and implementing rel=prev/next. You can get more info here: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/09/pagination-with-relnext-and-relprev.html
As you mentioned above, giving each objective a $ value is going to be absolutely necessary to measure ROAS. Hopefully, you can use some historical data to help you come up with the numbers.
I don't think there will be an ASAP solution to this. I think you simply need to continue to build a brand (authoritative website, social profiles, strong online presence) and increase the search volume for your brand. As more people begin to search for Zotey and click the "Search instead for zotey" it will go away.