I used TrueNAS in the past but last touched it several years ago.

I gather now there are two flavors: CORE which continues to use FreeBSD under the hood, and SCALE (aka Community Edition) which is based on Debian Linux. If I understand correctly, the former is only receiving security and stability updates, and iXsystems is developing all new features only on SCALE.

If you were to install fresh today, would you prefer this (FreeCORE), BSDnas, or the official SCALE version - and why?

No MacOS clients, so don't need SMB Spotlight.

I migrated from TrueNAS CORE to SCALE, and found that Linux had better performance. I don't see why you'd use FreeBSD if you don't have a very specific reason (hobby, jails, etc)