Im not a coating scientist (I’m a design engineer) so I can’t really answer your questions in detail. But powder coats are typically polyurethane or polyester. There are different types of wet paints as well. Some surfaces also get an additional UV top coat for abrasion resistance.
For a phone button you might be looking at something like PVD coatings or platings. Chromating wouldn’t be used in those cases as it is not terribly durable but it provides a good surface for the coating that goes on top or it. All of thses coatings are on the scale of a few mils thickness.
Most of these finishes are done on industrial scales and even the manufacturers send them out to external places for finishing (e.g. in Asia that type of facility is strictly controlled for environmental reasons) . At the end of the day I just speak with my supplier and tell them the finish I want and they take care of the rest.
Not quite, conductor diameter is important to supply proper current, which will change depending on the impedance of your speaker. There are other values like inductance and capacitance in a wire that could affect how your speaker sounds. The good news is that you can pretty much buy any cheap 16 ga copper speaker wire and not worry about it, as it would take effort to make a speaker wire that sounds bad (and those companies are the type to try to charge you $1000/ft for it!)