It’s great to give your brain daily workouts on the ins and outs of systems, but if you’re feeling burnt out, you’re doing that too much, probably, and my guess is, it’s coming in at moments when you were trying to solve some other, more interesting/relevant problem.
It comes down to whether you’re trying to self-host, or trying to learn Linux at a level where you could get a job doing it. Often it’s a bit of both, so don’t feel like you need to make that decision right now.
But my advice: whatever you’re hosting, use their recommended easy way to host it. In most cases, this means running a container. In most cases, Docker. If you can wrap your head around using docker compose files, your practical problems are reduced by an insane amount, and idiocy at the developer level becomes your only concern. For instance, I used to run Tandoor, but the dev pushed changes into their “stable” docker container that failed to properly migrate my data, and the whole thing cacked. But that wasn’t a system problem on my end, it was a case of a dev who was more interested in playing around with data than with providing a stable app.
So, if you take this approach, which I absolutely do recommend, the one thing you need to be sure of is that you have a good backup strategy, and that you backup before you do any pulls of new images. Docker allows you to select old versions so if you don’t like changes that get pushed on something, likely you can just rebuild the old version, but the changes might mess with your database migrations, so you need those backups. Other than that, you cannot go wrong with Docker, if you just want the damn thing to work, rather than get daily aggravating lessons in esoteric systems problems which are above your paygrade.
Nix is fun when you’re ready for it, but the only Systems noobs that should consider it are people who are already programmers in some other milieu, because Nix is specifically for people who think like programmers. This is not a bad thing, if you have learned to think that way it’s a joy on many levels, but at this point in time, unless this is 100% hobby, it’s not the best use of your time.