Plex sucks but jellyseer, the *arr stack and jellyfin are all open source and entirely free. Together they provide an experience almost as straightforward as any commercial streaming platform: find a media on jellyseerr and request it with a single click. A few minutes* later the media is available in Jellyfin, and you can watch it on your computer, smartphone, smart TV, …

*with Usenet and a good internet connection

Yeah, if an app posts any kind of notification it definitely needs background usage permission.

Look up your phone on dontkillmyapp.com and make sure tailscale is excluded from battery and network “optimization”.

Wireguard, like all VPNs, definitely does E2E encryption. What would be the point of an unencrypted VPN?

As it seems nobody’s linked it yet, have you read Jellyfin’s hardware selection page? They go into great details about which HW features are required/desired.

In my case I’m running it on a NUC with an i3 8109U + 16GB RAM, it runs great with 2 or 3 transcoding jobs at once. Media are stored on 5400-RPM HDDs.