If you're installing third party services, and exposing them to the internet, or even local networks, it's not out of line to expect you to know what you're doing. At least enough to turn off the 'dont shoot yourself in the foot' protections

People who "don't know what they're doing" will just disable SELinux if it's too difficult to configure the policy that they want. It's better to make security policies easy to configure correctly so that more people do it correctly.

Also, what does "third party" really mean in this context? I am neither the author of the Linux distro that I'm using nor the web server that I want to use. It's all third party software from my point of view.

You need some level of expertise to turn off selinux, or even know what it is. They know what they're doing enough to know the consequences if they can turn it off.

By third party, i mean stuff not in the distro. It's extra effort to install something else. You're likely to have at least a link to docs in your face when you went and got the binaries.

Every casual user is using a distro packaged version. That's why distros exist.

If you're doing your own packaging then presumably you know how to invoke the server by creating a service file for systemd.

I don't think this is true in general. For example, in one instance I wanted to use caddy, which wasn't packaged for CentOS at the time. I don't think I had trouble getting it to run as a non-root user, but getting it to work with SELinux was a big PITA.

The Linux community seems to have a pervasive "if you're doing X then you should be able to Y" kind of attitude. But sometimes you just need to do X, and you know what you know.

That's totally unrelated to the topic of how services are invoked.

SELinux is indeed a PITA. I usually just turn it off.

Your complaint about the community says more about you than about the community. It's certainly not true as a rule.