I think my logical next step is actually to abandon the effort of using NextCloud it’s just not polished enough to run a family cloud server especially with Photos and such.
It may be okay for simple file sharing, contact management and centralized backups though, but those would generally avoid the actual UI and use DAV or the VFS sync.
Now that I typed that out… maybe I just need something like a DAV server + VFS sync that doesn’t cost $$ like Mountain Duck