For me at least I never considered a synology nas it seemed like the apple of home servers. Especially when I enjoy building machines anyway there was no point. Although I can definitely see the appeal for some people.
I wonder if there are more open solutions that don't require building a machine from scratch.
Finally starting my self hosted journey. I have everything I need I'm setting up a 6tb nas for linux iso's photos and files. And I recently got a "broken" laptop that works perfectly fine that I will use for running all my applications in proxmox such as immich, jellyfin and nextcloud. And probably many others in the near future.
Kubenetes or k3s and some volunteer computing programs. Or mine monaro to offset the power bill of your other servers.
Proxmox definitely has a harder set-up i am currently doing it right now and I've found it a bit of a learning curve, but it is definitely the ultimately better and more fun option if you ask me ;)
Someone should correct me if I'm wrong but auto update should be as easy as scheduling the commands for apt or whatever package manager your using to update.