Bram

That is the boundary exactly. Files on a network solve the desk and nothing else.

I run the second category and nothing else and I want to make the case properly, because it gets dismissed as the boring answer.

A plain share, snapshots on the storage layer underneath, and one tunnel for when I am out. Six years. It has never once needed my attention on a weekend. There is no database to migrate, no app catalogue to break, no upgrade that requires reading release notes to find out what has been renamed.

The thing your post lists as its limitation - reaching it from outside on a phone: is real, and I solved it in the way people keep saying does not count, with a mesh VPN. Fifteen minutes to set up and it has needed nothing since.

I think "without a VPN" is doing a lot of quiet work in the original complaint. Once that constraint is dropped, the category has a good answer already, and the reason people reject it is that they want to hand out a link to someone else. Which is a sharing product, not a storage one.