Hi @christiaan,
Welcome to the Auth0 Community!
Thanks for the thorough breakdown.
You can disable signups for database connections in their settings. For social, see this thread: How to disable sign up via social login?
There isn’t a turn-key way to customize per application like there is for the global branding settings. Some customers will use separate tenants for their different branding, or there are some workarounds for the branding using page templates and application variables listed there.
It sounds like organizations would probably be a good fit here. It’s certainly worth looking at: