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I am wondering what the reasons for a non AIO installation of Nextcloud could be? What would be a reason or a use case to decide to go with a native installation instead of the AIO version? I would like to better understand the caveats of every method, since we plan to offer AIO for some SMB customers in Switzerland.
I think it’s important to distinguish between the Nextcloud Server itself and the deployment method.
From my understanding, bare-metal/native installations are still officially supported and documented by Nextcloud, so they are definitely a valid option.
However, when it comes to a fully integrated, turnkey deployment that is actively maintained by Nextcloud GmbH itself, Nextcloud AIO is currently the primary official solution. It provides a tested stack, simplified updates, integrated services and significantly reduces the maintenance burden.
Other installation approaches certainly work and are supported by the community or through the official documentation, but they usually require much more manual administration and responsibility from the operator.
For most home users and small organizations, I would therefore recommend AIO unless there is a specific reason to choose a native installation.
Hey @markuseicher welcome to the community 
as @vawaver has suggested, there are many installation methods such as Nextcloud snap which is a community driven installation method and is designed to be easy to install and simple to maintain. The ideal Nextcloud snap is an “install and forget” Nextcloud instance that works on most architectures and updates itself without needing administrative skills. Combining Nextcloud with Snapd makes it a perfect fit for IoT or scalable environments. Snapd is a secure and robust technology which the Nextcloud snap team has embraced. Most importantly snaps are designed to be secure, sandboxed, containerized applications isolated from the underlying system and from other applications.
It all depends on your use case, number of users, administrative capabilities and most importantly, whether you require an official support subscription:
While Nextcloud is open source and the sky is the limit as far as user numbers and scale are concerned. The community forum is a community of volunteer enthusiasts helping and supporting fellow users. The community has a huge knowledge base and some clued up folks who gladly share their knowledge and expertise in the spirit of open source. Community support is not affiliated and not obligatory!
Mission critical deployments require professional consultants, engineers and supporters. The recommendation suggests, from ~100 users you’re looking at a corporate instance and from ~500 users you’re looking at an enterprise solution. Boundaries and limits are fluent and there’s plenty room for interpretation. Your best option is to talk to the folks at Nextcloud or affiliate partners. They’re certainly helpful and inclusive and will not turn you away.
Thanks to both of you @scubamuc and @vawaver. I appreciate your guidance. What we aim for is a fully automated GitOps style solution using forgejo, OpenTofu and Ansible to deploy the AIO. We are in a very early stage of prototyping, learning and preparing a PoC. I will sure have a look at the Nextcloud-snap project, but to be honest, I do not like the open-core trail, Canonical is on. We aim to have a fully free and opensource solution. Glad to be here and having access to so many people with a huge knowledge and willing to help. Thanks, folks.
That is exactly why I switched from Ubuntu to Debian on all systems. While Snap certainly has its advantages, it is unfortunately also a burden.