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Tailscale is using “being opensource” as a marketing term and it’s working. The coordination server is a center piece of the architecture, the client being open is meaningless
Another example of this is Plex, many people don’t actually know the fact that it went closed and that only the client is open source
My point of vue is CasaOS / Unraid / Umbrel / … serve a good “first base” with selfhosting. Kind of like a gateway drug: gives you the candy to see how nice it could be but really under the hood, they are lacking a lot of substance.
I would never advise someone to limit their experience to those tools thought, as they lack so many things that are required for a proper long term selfhosting setup (monitoring, backups, encryptions, reverse-proxy, etc…). It’s a decent start thought.
Finally one criticism I could make is, unlike what you often read, I think it’s ok to abstract things. But the issue is, if you’re going to abstract away Docker completely you better make sure to offer everything the user needs to deal with their apps, and as far as I can tell, not only it’s not the case, but also those tools kind of tend to be opiniated in questionable ways. I have never used CasaOS thought, so it’s only 3rd party observation
Using an outdated version of a container (including DBs!) that have known vulnerabilities that will be very easy to exploits including by bots, is so much worse than the risk of a container breaking after an update. Just monitor your server properly and you’ll be good