I'm not an expert by a longshot, but I think having read one entire book on North Korea puts me ahead of the average layperson-on-the-internet curve, lol. (Highly recommend that book, btw.)
And I agree that caution is necessary here, and that many people online are counting chickens. Even presuming that Un has decided to get his Nobel Peace Prize*, it's a loooooong road ahead.
We still don't really understand the purges Un has done to his senior staff; we still don't really understand the deals he has with Russia, we still don't fully know how hard China has been pressing him. There's a lot of unknowns here.
And, hey, it's not impossible that all of these factors have aligned such that we're on a path to peace. It's UNLIKELY, I agree. And it's IMPOSSIBLE that things will be awesome overnight. I'd say that there are 70% odds that this is a complete bamboozle, 5% odds that Un has decided to turn the whole thing around, and 25% odds that it's something in the middle.
And that 25% is what keeps me the most hopeful, because any progress would be welcomed at this point.
*Re: Un's Nobel-- At some point, you know that he's thought about it. There is a way out for him and his government, for them to keep their riches and their harems, for them to get out while the getting is "good." Un is known, like his father before him, to have his vices. The choice could be as simple as "be rich, live trapped in Pyongyang, have a harem, be constantly concerned that you'll be assassinated, and work all the time" and "be rich, live a life where you can travel, have a harem, be significantly less concerned that you'll be assassinated, get a nobel peace prize, and have significantly less actual day-to-day work to do."
If you're interested in the Northern side of things you should check out this book.
Personally, I feel like I need to do some reading on the South since I've only ever been truly fascinated by the north.
I would like to recommend <em>The Real North Korea</em> by Andrei Lankov. It's an excellent examination of what life is like, a bit of the history, and even corrects some western misconceptions of life there. Towards the end he also talks about the future of the DPRK and how the West could approach handling the country.
I read(or rather listened) to that book a few years ago, but when I watched the first half of the K-Drama Crash Landing On You, I was pleasantly surprised to find out that they had used defectors as advisors on how to portray life in the DPRK. With that in mind, it matched up fairly well with Lankov's book on the country, signaling to me that both seemingly unrelated pieces of media showcase what it's really like to live in North Korea.
The short of it is that it's definitely dystopian, but people still find ways to live their lives somewhat happily. Like, North Koreans are actually people, which seems obvious to say, but it doesn't really hit home unless you can see or read about their accurate personal experiences(fictional or real).
Overall, the book didn't feel like tankie propaganda at all(just in case that's what anyone is worried about), but it did change my stance from "FUCK N.K, WE NEED TO INTERVENE" to a much calmer "We need to find solutions that don't cause war or strife."
I'm going to now. The last one I read was this which is one of the best books out there, IMO.