People love to go around talking about how easy Linux and self-hosting and Home Assistant are but they aren't.
I ran Home Assistant for about 3 years. It's incredibly powerful but it's also incredibly complicated. After the 3rd time it offed itself I just put all the mechanical shit back in and deleted it.
Linux I kinda gave up on. It's awesome playing Steam games on my Steam Machine but even just playing GOG or Epic games it's 50/50. I still have Linux on my laptop but I simply can't use it for a lot of stuff so I mostly use an old iMac.
So yeah, it's not just you. It's mostly fucking software engineers and developers constantly telling you how "easy" this shit is.