Depends. It’s a really easy way of bootstrapping a bitcoin node without having to do anything really. It’s very noob friendly.

I didn’t like that they moved away from focusing on Bitcoin, so it seemed at least. They’re not FOSS, so many people don’t like them for that reason. They also didn’t have any way of choosing which version of Bitcoin Core you wanted to run which is a bad thing IMO.

I haven’t run an Umbrel server in a long time so not sure what’s going on there anymore.

Start 9 is better, imho.

False. Run my own node and I love it. With lnbits you can have your own lightning address. Please dig into it. In my profile you see I have walletofsatoshi but payments and tipping I do via lnbits through my own lightning node. Alby extension needed for payments on browser but that is not a problem imho

Nobe works awesome. Umbrel + raspberry 4 perfect match

Its a fine product just has a very large market share (centralization) and they've moved away from FOSS and focusing less on being a bitcoin node and more on being a general self-hosting OS.

Which is fine just doesn't appeal to some people.

Im running my node smoothly for like 2 years. It works for me.