This person sounds like a shill, and the article sounds like a desperate plea for people to come back. There is not a single mention of accepting risks associated with Google, or the reason why he thought maintenance was not going to be a problem, or what his maintenance issues actually were. I assume maintenance is worse if you're doing something illegal or hosting media servers that access material in violation of copyright laws.

TLDR: Does not know how to setup VPN for remote access. His NAS needed constant maintenance and broke frequently (playing around too much?). Used Youtube as information source / to solve problems. Does not use backups so is afraid of "losing half of his digital life" if the NAS breaks.

Skill issue

I don't think everyone should self-host. This person was certainly in over their head.

Synology likes to pretend that it's easy, but doing it right in the ways that make it actually superior to something like Google Drive, is not.

It would be nice if everyone could know someone, who does run one.

Why have a NAS per person, when you can have one per family, friend group, or workplace?

Sadly that will lead to some people relying on hardware that WILL fail in ways that means lost data. Tons of small scale users does mean a lot of people who won't quite know what they should know about how to do it.

Selfhosting is the best solution for everything except maybe email. I'm not sure the author of this article actually knows how to use computers.

Totally agree with everything they said.
Disagree with the implied false dichotomy of NAS or Google Drive. There are other options. Proton drive is great for convenient file sharing.