You need to manually download and unpack monerod binary, see no point to check version, you can keep enabled though. No need if firewall will block 18089 access. ZMQ is used by p2pool, again, remove the parameter if not using p2pool

You can set some random port for RPC, but it’s password protected anyway, feel free to change if you prefer so.

it’s cli because it’s mostly for servers, you setup monerod there along with p2pool and connect your local miners to it for gui try Gupax, very easy to use