I've never run Plex, or Jellyfin for that matter. There's a video share on my NAS.
I point Infuse on Apple TV 4K's at it. It works, and cleanly.
Downsides: you have to pay for Infuse Pro to play some formats and deal with some audio codecs. It's IIRC $17 for a year, though, so pretty reasonable for continued development. Your non-technical friends and family can't do the initial setup themselves (it's shared over Tailscale, they can all use the same limited account on your plan), but anyone I'm going to let do this can ship me their Apple TV 4K and let me set it up for them.
It's just weird that it's this complicated. We should get a static IP from our DNS. We should use standard open source streaming conversion mechanisms. It should go over basic video codecs.
Lately I've been working towards just using a webserver to host video files. Sure, it's not adaptive, but for goodness sakes it's simple.
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yeah I'm on the same boat. I just have an old laptop hooked up to the tv, which can access a shared folder on my main computer that has all the media. I control it with a wireless mouse, and get an actual fast UI with a web browser instead of the usability nightmare that is a smart tv UI. this is all Windows though, I guess it's possible to have Linux access a Windows shared folder, I've been meaning to look into it for a while
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