Nice sounds similar to what I do. I bought Unraid because everyone always suggested it. No regrets. It really makes things simple and have only had minor problems (usually related to docker). I had a HDD fail and recovery was easy (besides the 18 hours of rebuild). But the drive is emulated during repair so no real downtime.

Family photos I use cloud storage for. I could probably get away with just doing local because I do hate that I'm sure they are being used to train AI. But I'd have to do off-site storage somewhere anyway. Parity drives don't really do well in the "fire" scenario. Don't want to have any risk of losing photos of my daughter growing up.