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The problem isn't really installing backstage but integrating all the stuff around it.

It is not a turnkey solution per se and what they call plugins aren't plugins in the traditionnal sense where you would just download a package and put it in a directory. It requires editing the actual react code to set most of them. So maintaining backstage involve maintaining a set of patches and a pipeline to build a docker image.

Agreed. We've seen this with our customers at OpsLevel who lean away from Backstage. Installing (and updating) Backstage is painful.

One of our team members who previously ran a Backstage instance at $OldJob wrote about that pain:

https://www.opslevel.com/blog/hands-on-backstage-learnings

This is exactly why we created https://roadie.io I'm the founder.