>>tgiba+Kek
As a counter-anecdote: literally just `docker compose up` on a spare laptop for me, and it's working great (though it's only available on the local network). There might be stuff to tune (e.g. I'm pretty sure it's not using my GPU), but it's almost totally unnecessary for just one household of people's use - the initial huge google-photos-takeout took an hour or three to finish indexing with all the features enabled, but all new stuff is done within seconds. The most I've done is to swap the actual photo storage to an external drive, which is just a "move that folder, custom mapping in the docker command" change.
On hardware that doesn't have docker, or is significantly more resource constrained somehow: yea, I completely believe it. I haven't tried that, but given the features it makes total sense that it'd be harder.