Great suggestions in your post. I suspect we cannot know life's true purpose, though some who have spiritual awakenings may disagree with me. Maybe we're a simulation, maybe we're imperfect, maybe each of us has some different puzzle pieces that add up to something greater. Since we are built not to fully understand, and each of us is given a few good years here, I think we should spend our time trying to maximize our experiences, address challenges rather than run from them, grow into better people, treat others well, and generally try to leave the world better than we found it.
What makes the topic controversial, I think, is that whatever purpose you chose, they will typically stand in conflict to some of the others. So for instance, maximization of experience is not necessarily (most likely isn't) compatible with leaving the world better than we found it. And so it goes for many of the other ideas we may have. It's extremely difficult to be consistent on the level of purposes and the overall meaning of life. And yet, I think it is our duty to allocate at least some of our investigative capacities to unifying our intuitions about these things and align them with the objective truth as far as possible.
From the spiritual teachers I respect the most they say it is almost as if the mystery of existence deepens. So before enlightenment one knows who one is and what to do, but after enlightenment, one knows that this is unknowable, and is able to live fully in that mystery, not on a conceptual level of a phony mystery or puzzle, but just being deeply embedded in the fact of actual existence to the point where the ordinary in its ordinariness appears like an ex nihilo miracle, moment to moment.
Yes, I've probably read and followed some of those same teachers. The more we know, the less we understand!