Didn’t that sound a lot like under the sheets of a bed?

Unless there’s liquid damage and it’s certain rows of keys not working at all it’s unlikely that you’d have that sort of partial failure of your keyboard. Even in that case it’s still usually the keyboard. If certain keys only work with excess pressure that’s pretty much 100% a hardware failure of the keyboard itself.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/163904761816. They also have it on Amazon and probably a few other sites.

Just looked into it a bit and although the part is pretty cheap it’s a bit of a tricky repair. If you had 50 dollars lying around and wanted something better than an external keyboard you could just do the whole top case (part that all the internals go into which contains the keyboard and trackpad). Still requires taking apart the computer completely, but if you (or a friend) are feeling adventurous it’s not a bad route.

What’s the model? I know a decent bit about laptop repair and I can do some research for you to see whether it would be a massive pain to replace the keyboard.

I’m sure that with him being an Italian immigrant, the name Caesar has NOTHING to do with ancient Rome. Absolutely zero link there.