This is my theory as well. NC has grown gradually in silos almost, every piece of it is some plugin they've imported from contributions at some point.

For example the reason there's no cohesiveness with a common websocket bus for all those ajax calls is because they all started out as a separate plugin.

NC has gone full modularity and lost performance for it. What we need is a more focused and cohesive tool for document sharing.

Honestly I think today with IaC and containers, a better approach for selfhosting is to use many tools connected by SSO instead of one monstrosity. The old Unix philosophy, do one thing but do it well.