I have not personally experienced any issues with hardware transcoding. My server is an old Dell Optiplex and I use clients on Linux, Android, Roku and Shield.

Yes you are correct about remote access and if that was a priority for me, I would happily learn that part instead of paying for Plex.

I don’t know why anyone would pay that instead of using Jellyfin. I’ve had my server up for years now and it works great.