Not practical advice, but since you're throwing out alternatives, one that I've had my eye on is hexOS. It's a trueNAS scale (fork?) by a bunch of ex-unraid devs with the goal of making trueNAS as easy as unraid.
It still has a few more months of beta, though, so I haven't tried it. Also, like unraid, it has a paywall.
Yeah fair.
It's also kinda a fuzzy area, because some of their code is open source, but not all. And iirc they're partly funded by the folks who make trueNAS, but supporting a project supported by open-source folks isn't the same as supporting open-source folks themselves.
I figured it toss it out there anyways though.