@James *******
There may be lots of reasons why the DTV is better for this person and probably has helped them. It really isn't hard to live in Thailand on a DTV for 5 years. If you don't leave the kingdom often, just doing a same day trip border bounce to reset every 6 months works fine. As far as banking, get a Wise card or equivalent for no forex fees and ideally an account that refunds foreign ATM fees and you are golden. Only thing missing would be PromptPay which is no huge deal vs. cash.