I second that. Home Assistant "just works". I have had it running on this cheap used HP EliteDesk 705 G3 Mini Desktop for more than 4 years now without a hiccup and barely any maintenance or hygeing work on it. Just sitting in my tv stand and doing it's work.
Not who you asked, but I do it “manually once a year or so” on a HA instance in a container running on unraid. It sometimes causes problems. Recently HACS (not a built-in part of HA but useful to get some extensions) broke on a HA update and I had to spend more time that I would have liked figuring out how to fix it. It involved running shell commands inside the container. Definitely not for anyone who isn't a techie.