Selfhosted

Hey guys! After over 2 years of me asking how to take the first steps in self-hosting, I think I've finally got most of the things I need set up (except for a mailcow server proxied through a VPS, but that's for another day). I've been seeing a bunch of posts here about the *arr stack, and only recently it piqued my interest enough to really warrant a serious look. But I'll be honest, it's a bit confusing. For now, I'm just thinking of starting up the whole suite on my machine, then slowly expose to internet the parts I find useful (and shut down the parts I don't). But I really can't find any good...tutorial(?) on how to quickly get the whole stack running, and I'm a bit worried about launching individual apps since I don't know if/how they communicate with each other. So I'll try to summarize my, quite naïve, questions here:

• how exactly do I set up a quick stack? Is that possible? And more importantly, is that recommended?
• most of the tutorials/stacks I see online use plex for video streaming, but seeing a lot of negativity around plex and its pricing, I reckon using jellyfin would be better. Does it just plug into the ecosystem as easily as plex apparently does?
• I've already set up a hack-ish navidrome instance to stream music, but managing files is a real hassle with it. Does sonarr(?) do it any better?

I know most of these questions can be easily answered through some LLM (which I don't wanna rely on) or scouring documentation (which honestly look a bit daunting from my point right now), so I figured it'd be best to ask here. Thanks for any help!