I run TrueNAS Scale at home myself.

There’s no need to proactively check in on anything if you’ve set up email alerts. It’s pretty straightforward to give the NAS permission to send you emails in case a drive dies on you rather than failing silently.

Docker containers are just a nice bonus. You don’t need to use them if you don’t want to, but it is awfully convenient to run things like media encoders, torrent clients, download managers, etc. directly on your storage.