A quick response to what Tools do you recommend for making interactive maps?
This would be my top suggestion for getting something running quickly assuming you already have the data. The site has lots of docs + examples, tooling for generating these maps from within Jupyter and Tableau is coming soon. All the pieces are open source in case you end up needing to customize it further, but you can get something quite advanced without writing any new javascript. The downside is that you can't perform data aggregation/transformation from within the tool, so all data shaping needs to happen before you upload your data file. If your data is private, you can self host or run this application locally.
Some unique UI controls that'll work out of the box for you - sliders with histograms visualizing the variable you're filtering on, timeline filters, easily 3d data layers or point