To me, the major issue of self-hosting (once overcome the tech barrier etc...) has always been protection. Not from external actors or attacks, but from incidents. By which I mean backups. Safest option is online backup, which is expensive and takes your data sovereignty away once again. Or I can once a year make a hard copy and take it to my parents (who live in a different country) for storage, and swap the backups out. Either way, very suboptimal. If anyone has a good way to achieve this, please lmk

Agree backups are hard and can be expensive! A lot of people recommend Backblaze https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-storage and it cost ~$6/month per TB