I don’t have a ton of experience with NASes but I’ve just recently set up my first unRAID server and had similar requirements.

Totally agree with the USB annoyance. It technically serves as the boot drive but the OS itself runs on the RAM once started. I have a 500gb ssd which I use as a cache drive, then an array of 2x4tb HDD plus another 4tb parity drive, with plans to expand; ultimately that’s why I chose unRAID over TrueNAS because I read that it was much easier to add drives to your array in the former.

As far as docker, I run 9 containers 24/7. Most of them are *arr media acquisition software and Jellyfin. I don’t think I’ve ever had to do CLI with those with the exception of installing a cloud flare tunnel. The native docker support works well. Some people prefer spinning up a Linux VM then using docker on that but I’ve never found a reason to try that (plus I can’t get VMs working correctly. Not sure why).

As a comparison, I’ve also got an orangepi5 which I run home assistant and associated containers via docker compose, and the unraid system is definitely a lot easier.

A piece that I don’t have the knowledge to address is which platform would be the easiest to import your data into. From my limited experience, I had to add drives to my array, format them to the desired file system, add my data over the local network, then physically add the remaining drive. With as much data as you have, that strat could be problematic.