I have basically the same setup using Arch, because I don't trust distributions that patch a lot, and btrfs, because I use disks of mismatched sizes.

I used to change the frequency governor for my cpu on my previous NAS but the default Linux setup (schedutil) is now perfectly adequate. Same with disk power, default is fine.

The whole thing just shugs along happily with basically no effort on my side apart from the occasional upgrade requiring manual intervention.

It certainly didn't require anything which I would consider non sense - and I have seen plenty of things I would call that in the past, looking at you OpenLDAP and PAM. Sure, you need to have a vague idea of what RAID is but then again building a NAS and expecting to need zero knowledge of storage seems extremely ambitious to me. Then again, I realise that what I consider basic knowledge taken for granted might not seem to be so basic someone else point of view.