Ultimately the car needs the suspension gone through and an alignment before anything so long as it isn't consuming oil. If you swap the parts yourself and get an alignment done you will save the bulk of the cost since parts are usually cheap for stuff from that era. The only concerns here are the oil residue and the potential leak in the steering rack, but you would have to clean everything up and find out where it is coming from. A few seals or gaskets are usually pretty simple swaps, and it could just be one thing causing all the residue.

I am not one to buy a new car just because the old one needs work, but I am also one to just do the work. The amount of money you would put into your current car to replace the main stuff with issues (if you are mostly just buying parts and swapping them yourself) is probably very similar to what a normal downpayment is on a new car or a few months of payments. If you buy something used for cheaper then you really don't have an idea if you are that far from needing to do all this on the newer car anyway.

The platform you have is solid, so my thought in that case is to stick with it unless there is something structural that can't be fixed. Learning to do your own work will ultimately be the cheapest way forward regardless, and I prefer to maintain a known vehicle instead of make payments on something I don't know the history of.