I did it myself with my note 9, which I would guess is about the same difficulty level. It was honestly not so bad, you just wanna really take your time and especially have a lot of patience with the screen. The other possibility though is that you have some compressed fluff deep inside the port. The only thing I’ve ever gotten deep enough to fish that stuff out is a sowing needle.
I have no clue about the old launcher, but the current launcher allows you to select any version all the way back past alpha. It was a lot of fun to try to hunt down which version I probably first played.