This came up in a discussion on the LinkedIn “InDesign Secrets” group a few months ago. The person was asking about “blind endnotes” (a phrase I had not heard before).
My answer was:

I don’t know of any way to import blind endnotes from Word, but I do have a good solution for adding page numbers in InDesign: cross-references. Usually, x-refs point to paragraphs, but you can also point to a specific point in text using Text Anchors. I describe how to do this in this article: https://creativepro.com/creating-cross-references-text-anchors/

Then, you would want to create a custom cross-reference style that shows only the page number… or perhaps the page number followed by a dot and a space… or something like that. There’s more on editing the x-ref style here: https://creativepro.com/adding-the-last-page-number-in-a-book-to-text/

Peter Kahrel also wrote a script for me that I think does this… but I would need to dig it up. Would you want to test it?

One company we’ve worked with is AvatarDPS. The owner, Coletta, wrote this article some years ago about data publishing:

Automated Publishing

Distressed edges are possible in a vector layout tool, like InDesign, but they’re much easier to create in pixels.
There are templates you can get that do distressed or rough edges… I remember seeing some cool stuff from this company: https://psmgraphix.com/collections/frame-elements

There is a difference between doing a transformation (rotation, scale, etc) with the Selection tool vs the Direct Selection tool! Check this out:

Rotating Text and Text Frames Independently

Well, that’s an interesting idea!