If you dont need filesharing, you can just setup wireguard, setup a network drive on your phone's files app.l, and then when connected it'll feel like native file browsing.

Syncthing is very nice.

I have nothing but issues with it, mostly because the iOS/Android apps are notoriously bad at syncing the files timely and also because of ridiculous filename restrictions on Android.

Is not the same though. It requires downloading the entire shared folder. That doesn't work when I have 100+GB of files and I want to share it with my phone

I only share with one person so we use Seafile

What makes Samba annoying? I think it's perfect for its intended use (LAN).

If you need to share files externally, Nextcloud works very much like Google Drive and allows the creation of sharable links.

Nextcloud, Samba serving SMB isn't really equivalent.

Nextcloud also has lots of interesting plugins. I recently found a viable Splitwise alternative I chucked on my instance.

I don't get how Samba is not there yet. We already have everything in the OS, the UI, the mental model, the protocols, how come it's such a terrible experience that we need to re-invent the wheel in web 2.0.. Maybe we need a Jarred Sumner to fix it.

Samba has never been about file sharing over the internet. The project has been about cleanroom-reverse-engineering specific MS technology. To start it was NT4 authentication domains, then printing services, along the way SMBv1 (commonly incorrectly called CIFS btw), then SMBv2 v3.x, and then in 2012 Samba Active Directory.

In no way has it ever been about a functional alternative to something like Nextcloud. It's been about services primarily for LAN functionality, not stuff that should be going over the internet (mostly for security reasons).

So your expectations really don't align with what Samba has ever been about.

Source: I professionally support Samba for businesses.

There is Peergos: https://peergos.org (disclaimer: I am the creator)

Proton Drive works well and is from a company that supports privacy but does require a paid subscription.