That's a long rant, but your on point with it. I have a colleague who refuses to try new things cuz they don't understand that it makes life easier, I do tend to find the solutions that are simpler and easier to work
I would have a look at your networking as I have lots of cloud services setup on my home assistant running on a pi4, without more network info it's difficult to say where you might have issues
Or jerboa, I use that right now