As a rule of thumb, pay attention to crypto parameters and cipher 'suites'. Use the highest SHA, use seven word diceware phrases for the password, ensure the latest TLS version is used, use a reputable & robust RNG, etc
If you don't know what you're doing SHA-512/256 (note that's not a choice, that's the name of a single SHA-2 family member) is probably the member of the SHA-2 family to choose.
My feeling is that like in 2001 it would have been valuable to get people to switch to a non-extendable hash by default because people were freelancing their own MACs, but sometime in the intervening 2 decades people switched fully over to HMAC, so that if you're dealing with someone who is literally writing their own prefixed key hash MAC, you've got bigger problems than Merkle Damgard.