It's great that you wrote this up!

One thing I have found with many open source/selfhostable projects is just how much running them yourself can vary. It can go from a simple compose file with everything included to having to dig for obscure services and piece together how they all form the whole.

For example, I recently looked into self hosting Zotero. It is so under documented and complex that there is almost no way one could self host that (even for just one user) without that being ones job. So one needs to make a distinction between something being open source and being feasible to use/maintain.

In the end I gave up with Zotero. Even though it could have replaced Obsidian Notes, Calibre and Syncthing all at once for me.