Who said it was a challenge? When does grunt work move beyond challenge to the point of not being worth it? I got out of self hosting because my time is too valuable. It did teach me lots of new skills, so that was great! However, somebody not wanting a time sink, is not them avoiding challenge.

This is the boat I'm in. And even if you do "everything right" and have snapshots before & after every update, you still need to actually debug why the update failed in the first place. So even then, LTS releases would be a greatly appreciated feature.

Maybe they're challenging themselves on things that interest them more...and just want a functioning Nextcloud instance?

We wouldn't tell Google engineers to mess with his Google drive in prod... why should he sacrifice data availability and integrity?