I'm curious which aspect(s) became a time sink for you? I self-host a bunch of stuff myself. I can't say I never spend time on it, but it's measured in hours per year. Once stuff is set up, it just runs.
For reasons not clear to me, if a system update requires compiling a large thing (e.g. Immich + TritonLLVM), 95% of the time it will break the internal LAN's network interface. I think updating is important (especially for a router), this means that a few times a week I have to babysit the system update to be there to reboot the server manually.