Going from tailscale in the cloud -> self-hosting netbird required a richer mental model so I had to learn more about routing, why ZTNA is better, what is OIDC, etc

I do think that netbird's documentation is easier to read than tailscale's, but the tone does still assume a solid foundational networking background in places.

My uneducated guess is that the product is appealing to networking professionals, but a growing number of current/former tailscale users that are otherwise new to networking, but familiar w/ self-hosting. With the latter group, there's a steeper learning curve (that would also be there for headscale or most other self-hosted mesh VPN solution fwiw)