> most people would get burned out by the complexity unless you really like managing servers, automating things with scripts, and navigating the little quirks that pop up with the hardware and software involved.

I didn't see the author's stated OS they use for their NAS, but depending on what it is, yes. {Free, True}NAS are dead easy to use as long as you stay inside the confines of the GUI, and hugely reliable. Anything else is no man's land. Running ZoL and you did a routine kernel update? Enjoy your new read-only ZFS pool!

I have a setup very similar to the author's, with a bunch of Debian VMs on top of Proxmox. Can confirm that even with Packer and Ansible handling base images and configuration, weird edge cases pop up that take quite a while to track down.