Honestly my biggest pain point with all personal accounting systems was that there was no easy, free way to automatically pull my transaction data from all my accounts into a single, local file that I can play with as I want. I really don't want to go to all my accounts every month and click download.

There still isn't, but I did recently find simplefin(https://beta-bridge.simplefin.org/). Its not great (e.g. quota of only ~25 requests per day), but its good enough and the price was cheap enough that I just bit the bullet. It also paired well with Actual budget, and now I have a personal accounting system that I am reasonably happy with.

I also found teller.io, which is frankly a better dev experience (and good free tier!), but they don't support all the banks I'm on and somehow simplefin does.