Docker allowed me to be far more competent on a Linux box than my skill set should have permitted at the time. I no longer needed to know how an application ran, just that it did. Provide some persistent storage and you’ll probably never have to configure that app again. Amazing.
The problem is package managers are bad (well, apt is bad, rpm is pretty ok, freebsd ports are pretty good, there are many others) and package maintainers are bad, it always seems like the job they give the intern to figure out instead of making it a cornerstone of usability.
Seriously, spend a day setting up things running on freebsd with the packaging you have and it will be a breath of fresh air. Nearly everything you can think of all put together in packages in one place, and most of them start working in an expected way with zero configuration fiddling, install and start.
If package management were better, docker might not have existed at all, people keep confusing it with decent package management.
Plex does the plumbing for you, I think NextCloud might too.
Doing DNS just seems like another thing to setup which is just fine. Pay namecheap, then pay a big boy DNS provider (I like dnsmadeeasy) then register some domains.
I don't really want a solves everything tool because I don't see a way for it not to be really opinionated and hide everything behind its own abstraction which isn't really any better than the interface it is hiding. Maybe a series of how-to whitepaper kinds of thing to build up the requisite knowledge to figure these things out.
I'm not a fan of the old school configuration hell where you have to spend hours/days/weeks trying to figure out the correct set of software and config options to do something right, but I'm equally not a fan of completely canned solutions that hide everything in favor of a single button to push. I'm not a technician, I don't need to have everything done for me, but I do appreciate tools where right configuration interface is provided. That is, sane defaults, well documented options, meaningful errors and sanity checking, and options given in the right way.