We've been running a production ceph cluster for 11 years now, with only one full scheduled downtime for a major upgrade in all those years, across three different hardware generations. I wouldn't call it easy, but I also wouldn't call it hard. I used to run it with SSDs for radosgw indexes as well as a fast pool for some VMs, and harddrives for bulk object storage. Since i was only running 5 nodes with 10 drives each, I was tired of occasional iop issues under heavy recovery so on the last upgrade I just migrated to 100% nvme drives. To mitigate the price I just bought used enterprise micron drives off ebay whenever I saw a good deal popup. Haven't had any performance issues since then no matter what we've tossed at it. I'd recommend it, though I don't have experience with the other options. On paper I think it's still the best option. Stay away from CephFS though, performance is truly atrocious and you'll footgun yourself for any use in production.