and look, i am sure qnap and Aghyzzicgh from aliexpress might do this too, but i can't speak to them. I bought a synology on recommendation from a friend. My first one got hit by lightning (yes) and i had to buy a new NAS but the drives still work. i've replaced the original drives, but they still work. i installed one in my kid's machine to hold games. My current synology is a 4-bay dualcore with 2GB of ram.
it works perfectly for all this stuff. my phone automatically backs up photos to it when i connect to wifi, for example. If you put your syno on a public IP, you can hotlink to content on it. there may be ACL shenanigans, i have no idea. I don't use it that way.
why don't i use my synology that way?
Because i run a public nextcloud instance to be able to synchronize my photos and documents and hotlink them.
derp https://nextcloud.projectftm.com/index.php/s/synoscreenshot
I love Immich [0] for photos, Jellyfin [1] works great for music and movies, just spun up a memos container for notes. For documents and stuff I would use dropbox for I just FTP into with Cyberduck or Filezilla.
As for besides NextCloud, just to check my blind spot.