Selfhosted

Sounds good, I'm trying out the app and seeing if I can really use it to replace obsidian, and I might dedicate some time to contribute if I end up using it. I agree with your assessment that obsidian's customization with its plugin eco system leads to it becoming a side project that you have to baby instead of just a note taking app.

I don't use a lot of plugins on obsidian, but I use rely on a few that make organizing notes easier, mainly:

1. Daily notes: I really like being able to click one button to create a note with a date and organized into date folders, these are usually quick notes that reference bigger notes. Not being able to do it with a click means I just won't do it at all, so my quick notes could very quickly become a giant list of unorganized files in the vault root.
2. Templates: not a huge deal, I can manually apply templates from a template .md file, but it's a nice feature.

On sync, two problems with using "whatever" to sync entire vault:

1. I have to install and configure syncing on every device, and make sure they're connected
2. Merge conflict and sync order! I used to use seafile I sync, and I can't tell you how frustrating it was to lose entire notes because they were overwritten externally.