> It just seems a bad idea to expose such a server to the Internet and maintain it

Why? Nerds have been hosting services for their friends and family for decades now. It was one of the primary benefits of knowing an IT nerd. They probably had a few servers co-located at work or with their friend who worked for the local ISP. These days with cloud I suppose it's changed, but I didn't think this skillset had eroded that much.

Hosting services on the public internet isn't very scary. If your Plex server gets zero day'ed, you just reinstall it and start over. Chances are that will never happen.

I host the media server, you come help me fix my plumbing when I need it sort of thing.

> That's a lot of effort for very questionable return, considering the requirements for your hard drive space, bandwidth, the time it takes to curate your library including "acquisition" and pruning etc.

This part, sure. But it's like anything else you do for family and friends. When I ran an e-mail server for everyone it was a giant pain that eventually became not worth it once the free providers got better and more accessible.

Plus the whole "curating" thing is the fun part, usually! Most of that stuff is usually about 98% automated either way so the "job" is largely fixing automation when it chokes.