I have a lot of self-hosted services, including Nextcloud, and by far the majority of my time spent on the infrastructure is messing around with new stuff and changing things for fun. Actual maintenance time is nearly 0.
That's really reassuring to hear! I'm planning to stick with this for a year or two to see what pain it actually causes me, but I could definitely see maintenance headaches being thing to motivate a switch to something else. Hopefully I have the same experience as you, though!
To be fair... I think the learning curve causes higher maintenance time cost at the beginning. But eventually you get stable infrastructure as code set up with good log monitoring and backups and you really don't have to think about it anymore. Any problems and you'll get an alert.
The infrastructure might be stable now, but could break with an update.
Very true. Which is why I don't do automatic updates except for security updates. 99/100 times, though, if I update a docker container the new one works just fine.