I have this impression because of some initially different decisions to a self-hosted architecture (where you usually have not that powerful machines at home), it feels like a proprietary original service they replicate, which is designed to serve millions of users off beefy machines. And because of how rapid the development is. I’d be surprised to learn it’s not heavily vibe coded, considering all the aspects of the project.
I did not disable all the features, because I had to pick a beefy server for it, otherwise I’d started using the project years ago (I’m only months in). I confirm, it was super slow first days (I have about 500 GB library), then it settled down. I’d love it to be designed around comfortably living on a cheap weak hardware, as I believe just accessing my library (and not processing it) should be trivial. I just hope against hope that would be possible at some later stage of the development. Perhaps that is possibly today, I haven’t investigated too much. But I guess the documentation would cover it then.