I feel like this conversation does a very good job of explaining why FOSS alternatives so often have terrible usability. "Not how most people would do it in a selfhost environment" is effectively "not how a tiny, teensy, borderline irrelevant proportion of users would do it".

Selfhosting is moving towards being accessible to the average user in some areas. Not coincidentally, I suspect, mostly in areas where someone is trying to make money on the side (see Home Assistant increasingly trying to upsell you into their cloud subscription and branded hardware, for instance). This idea that structuring the software for the average phone user as opposed to the average home server admin is "bad" or "complicated" is baffling to me.

Oh, and for the record, no, that's not the line for legality when it comes to watching the media I own. I am perfectly within my rights to access the files in my hard drive in any way I want. At least where I live. I make no promises for whatever dystopian crap is legal in the US. If anything there is a gray area on my using a specific type of drive to be able to rip commercial optical media that is theoretically DRMd in ways that my drive just happens to ignore. But remotely accessing my legal backups in my local storage? Nah, even if I was more worried about piracy than I am I'd feel fine on those grounds.

But also, copyright as currently designed is broken and not fit for purpose, and I suspect you don't disagree and your pearl clutching here may have more to do with disliking Plex and not wanting to acknowledge an actually useful feature they provide than anything else. Maybe I'm reading too much into that.