I've been thinking of getting a camera setup, but all the popular stuff is cloud crap, and the best options seem to be Chinese crap that I wouldn't trust on my network, so I'll need a separate network for them.

It's a pain! Why can't I just get the popular hardware and just disable the stuff I don't want?

It's frustrating that nearly everything is either a security risk, a privacy risk, or a vendor lock-i, and often all three.