> Is zfs really worth the hassle, for someone who does not have time to play "home sysadmin" more than once or twice a year?

I'd argue that it's better for minimizing sysadmin work than the alternatives. Running a scrub, replacing a disk, taking a snapshot, restoring a snapshot, sending a snapshot somewhere (read: trivial incremental backups), etc. are all one command, and it's easy to work with.

> I've just rebuilt my little home server (mostly for samba, plus a little bit of docker for kids to play with). It has a hardware raid1 enclosure, with 2TB formatted as ext4, and the really important stuff is sent to the cloud every night. Should I honestly bother learning zfs...? I see it popping up more and more but I just can't see the benefits for occasional use.

The reason I personally would prefer it in that situation is that I don't really trust the layers under the filesystem to protect data from corruption or even to notice when it's corrupted. If you're sufficiently confident that your hardware RAID1 will always store data correctly and never mess it up, then it's close enough. (I wouldn't trust it, but that's me.) At that point, the only benefit I see to ZFS would be snapshots; an incremental `zfs send` is more efficient than however else you're syncing to the cloud.