I’ve been selfhosting Synapse on Docker Compose for… maybe 1.5 years now? I’m also running bridges. I’ve never had to do monthly maintenance. I have around 20 users (my friends) active daily, a few federated rooms. I have message retention on and it “just worked” for me (not sure why OP had to do extra config)

I only find two of the critiques to be true in my experience:

1. Onboarding can be confusing for non-technical users. I use SSO so no registration, but the average person doesn’t know what an encryption key is, and they probably don’t want to either.
2. Synapse is written in python and as such isn’t super kind to memory/cpu. I’m doing fine on my cheap Hetzner box though.

Overall synpase for me has been very much “set it and forget it”. I can’t remember when I last did server maintenance.