I went down a similar path as you. The entire proxmox community argues making it an appliance with nothing extra installed. But the second you need to share data — like a nas — the tooling is a huge pain. I couldn’t reliably find a solution that felt right.

So my solution was to make my nas a zfs pool on my host. Bind mounting works for CTs but not VMs which is an annoying feature asymmetry. So I decided to also install an nfs server that exposed my nas.

I know that’s not what you want but just wanted to share what I did.

The feature asymmetry between CTs and VMs basically made CTs not part of my orchestration.