Ran a homeserver for 5 years on a minimal VPS and it worked fine. Upsides - works everywhere, self hosted, feature complete. Client software in the ecosystem mostly felt bloated, with the exception of NeoChat. By 2022 the clients could no longer call each other. Decommissioned it this year in favor of traditional XMPP which works fine and it's nice that notifications are appropriately processed, finally.

Our team highly appreciates the work done in Matrix it's just unfortunate that the elephant in the room was never addressed at the start of the project, which is the need for a -simple- first-party administrative dashboard or tool to manage users, storage, and configuration. Without that core component, then you've got a layer of complexity between an admin and an audit which will increase likelihood of misconfiguration or resource management issues.