I have had Jellyfin directly open to the Internet with a reverse proxy for years. No problems.

Incorrect. Not run as root, but launched by root in a system service (runs as the pipewire user).

For my simple use case (storing Velero backups), it works perfectly and with a resource footprint ridiculously low (~ 3 MiB memory when idle). In comparison MinIO used 100 times more memory.

Don’t forget the Silverbullet users.