I've used nextcloud for close to I think 8 years now as a replacement for google drive.
However my need for something like google drive has reduced massively, and nextcloud continues to be a massive maintenance pain due to its frustratingly fast release cadence.
I don't want to have to log into my admin account and baby it through a new release and migration every four months! Why aren't there any LTS branches? The amount of admin work that nextcloud requires only makes sense for when you legitimately have a whole group of people with accounts that are all utilizing it regularly.
This is honestly the kick in the pants I need to find a solution that actually fits my current use-case. (I just need to sync my fuckin keepass vault to my phone, man.) Syncthing looks promising with significantly less hassle...
Been running NC on my home server and basically maybe update it once a year or so? Even less probably, so definitely not a must to update every time. Plus via snap it's pretty simple.
Might also consider Vaultwarden/Bitwarden as a self-host alternative. Yeah it's client-server... that said, been pretty happy as a user.
The linuxserver.io image for Nextcloud requires considerably less babysitting for upgrades: https://docs.linuxserver.io/images/docker-nextcloud
As long as you only upgrade one major version at a time, it doesn't require putting the server in maintenance mode or using the occ cli.