This is one of the most civil disagreements I've ever seen on the internet and I intend to start using this myself

Unraid is brilliant if you're interested in BYO hardware. It can be setup with mix and match drives, supports docker and virtual machines. Realistically it's a bit more work than Synology to get up and running, but once it is, the only thing you really need to do is update the software from time to time

I don't mind the idea of BYO hardware, especially if it's an old server with hotswap drive and hotswap power built in.

Increasingly, with the time I have towards the things that interest me, I just want storage and a bit of compute to be like a home appliance, reasonably set and forget it and leave my messing around on a USFF computer.

I've heard things about Unraid not being that performant due to the design of the disk array solution.

You can add a cache SSD to keep hot data to reduce access times, and why do you need that much of a throughput to begin with?

you can run ZFS without the Unraid disk array in unraid these days

Doesn't that get rid of one of the biggest benefit of Unraid where you can mix and match drives, just like in a Synology hybrid RAID?

I think this is just the tradeoff you need to make. I’m not aware of a solution where you can mix-and-match drives but also get the write performance of a traditional RAID array.

that is true, but you can make one fast pool using zfs and one slower one using unraids disk array, if you want to, or just use the zfs part as a cache for performance