I've been using things like Samba and NFS since the 1990s. They're not hard to figure out with useful resolution.

When I finally became determined to give ZFS a serious go around 2016, I looked at all of my options -- including throwing some hardware together for FreeNAS, and running FreeNAS in a VM.

I decided to just use an existing Linux box that was already doing storage stuff and add ZFS to it.

It's been fine ever since. Keeping ZFS going isn't deep voodoo at all; of all the things this box does, ZFS has probably been the most hands-off aspect of it.