Its not perfect but its great to be able to just search for things in a photo and find any matches across dozens of TBs of raws, without having to have some 3rd party cloud AI nonsense do all the work.
The only thing I wish they could get integrated is support for jxl compressed raws, which requires them compile libraw with adobe's sdk.
I installed immich in a VM. And the VM is using GPU passthrough. I don't see how it's overkill: immich is a kitchen sink with hundreds if not thousands of dependencies and hardly a month goes by without yet another massive exploit affecting package managers.
I'm not saying VM escapes exploit aren't a thing but this greatly raises the bar.
When one install a kitchen sink as gigantic as immich, anything that can help contain exploits is most welcome.
So: immich in a VM and if you want a GPU, just do GPU passthrough.
I agree that the search using facial recognition is nice in immich that said.