Torklift tie down maintenance

My 6 year old Torklift tie downs are in sad shape. The paint (or probably actually it is powder coat) is falling off so that there is now a lot of exposed and rusting metal.

So I need to paint them or something.

To prep, I started by scraping them with a wire brush and some emery cloth. That is helping to remove the chipping paint and some surface rust. But it is not taking all of the rust off down to bare metal. I think it would need to be sanded with a power tool versus hand scraping to accomplish that. But I don’t want to start sanding off metal. That means less metal left which can hurt the strength of tie down. Besides it would be a lot of work all that grinding.

So I am thinking I will hand brush with a wire brush plus some light emery cloth. Then I will need to paint over some rust. Is it ok to do that?

Or maybe this isn't’ necessary. Maybe it doesn’t really matter if the tie downs rust. For example, many of the metal parts under the truck are as rusted as the tie downs. Maybe there is so much metal on these parts that rust will never deteriorate the part to the point of failure.

However the tie downs were originally a painted part so I suppose I should paint them.

Then my next question is what to paint them with. The only thing I know of is rustoleum. Or is there something better?

So my questions are 1) how much prep should I do or can I paint over some rust, 2) what to paint the tie downs with, 3) or maybe rust on tie downs doesn’t really matter (except for how it looks) and I could defer this job since I am currently busy preparing other things for a 2 month trip.

I know that these are very basic questions but I don’t have experience with this topic.