> there is no way to easily self host images

When you run lxd init there's an option to make the server available over the network (default: No), if enabled you can host images from there.

    lxc remote add myimageserver images.bamboozled.com
    lxc publish myimage
    lxc image copy myimage myimageserver
    
    lxc launch myimageserver:myimage

That's half the story, I don't want to have to build my own infra to host something simple like an image in a redundant highly available way.

In the end I just settled from hosting on s3, downloading the images with curl (or similar) and running `lxc import`.

The support in configuration management tooling is also pretty limited and the stuff I've used has been fairly buggy, in my opinion, because it's not very popular.

In Proxmox "self hosting" meaning having a folder with LXC images is part of the distribution. You can download templates from online sources and use as images or create your own templates from already running LXCs. Or maybe you mean self hosting in another way?

I've only played around with LXC/LXD a little bit, what are some of the Ubuntu image issues? I did a quick google, but the first results seemed to be questions about hosting on Ubuntu rather than with the images themselves.

In my experience, most issues are related to kernel interfaces which LXC disables inside unprivileged containers, paired with software that does not check if those interfaces are there/work before attempting to use them.

These issues can be observed in the official Ubuntu image and seem to get worse over time. I would recommend to just use VMs instead.

If you feel that the existing images (of lxc-download?) have too many bugs for your liking, you could also try the classic templates, which use debootstrap and the like to create the rootfs.