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I agree, typographic conventions tend to be publisher centric and punctuation in style guides or writing orientated books.
Those are the two best rules. Ancient Romans didn't have punctuation, so no-one would publicly read a scroll without studying it to be sure of the meaning.
Because till recently (during my adult years), these were separate! Manuscripts, even if typed and even often on computer used *make bold* _Italics_ (less commonly underline). In fact many of these from Victorian era till 1990s are recognised and auto-converted by MS Word, LibreOffice Writer and most publishing software.
Your Wordprocessor will have a list of those it converts while typing and separately converts on import (copy/paste or insert).
You can usually do Ctrl-Z to undo "smart" conversion to really have an * at the start of a line , " rather than “ etc.
As an aside it's best to turn off Grammar while typing, word completion, word substitution, word collection and a few other things.
Do add custom dictionaries for each writing project or series and only add common words to the standard dictionary.
Commas are the most tricky. The BEST rule on deciding to put in or delete a comma is to first leave it out. If it is then ambiguous or bonkers put it in.
The Oxford comma is the last one in a comma separated list in front of the last item prefixed by “and”.
The three possibilities are:
1) Extreme USA, ALWAYS put it in.
2) Extreme UK, ALWAYS leave it out.
3) Trickiest, but IMO most logical. Only put in the Oxford comma if the list and sentence doesn't end with a single item and leaving it out creates confusion because instead of a single item it's more complex.
Option (2) only always works if a single final item.
Option (1) looks odd to non-American readers.
Don't use a comma without a “joining word” to join what might be two sentences. Leave them as two (called an evil comma splice). Unless the second sentence logically depends on a fact in the first sentence, then you can join with a semicolon. The two parts must be whole sentences.
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