I have been trying to get webdav to function on windows 10 machine for a while now as a network mapped drive and it just refuses to work. i want to use samba as an alternative to this to grant access users to the contents of their own directories. Is this possible or is it a good way to cause issues with Nextcloud?
Native webdav support on Windows is tricky. There are third-party program that can do that like mountain duck, netdrive, … Nextcloud is as well working on a virtual drive (was announced some time ago, not really clear when it will arrive).
You can put all your files on a samba server and use this as an external storage for Nextcloud.
You could also put the files on an external hdd, mount it to your Linux machine where Nextcloud is running on and mount it as local external storage in Nextcloud. Then you could create a samba-share on that Linux machine and share the same directory that you’ve mounted in Nextcloud.