• how do you use ansible? Is there a good source for roles or playbooks to set up services? I feel like ansible is 30% more headache right now during config.

I write my own playbooks and roles, but often I can just copy paste an existing setup and use it for a new service. For example containers, you can probably write one role once, copy it and modify some variables to set up another container service.For stuff where there are well maintained community roles (e.g. community.zabbix) just use those and configure with variables.

• how do you deal with motivation loss?

I just don't work on a part I don't want to do atm. It's supposed to mostly be a hobby and as long as my services I care about are running it's fine.

• how do you deal with the overwhelming amount of choices and information and disciplines (networking, storage, VMS, Linux..) that comes with selfhosting?

I'm on my 2.5th setup now, just choose something and see if it works. If not, see how much it bothers you and what parts you want to migrate.I'm a big fan of VMs, so I'm using XCP-ng. IMO this makes testing and backups very easy, I just take a snapshot and figure stuff out, no big deal if it breaks.

• how do you find the sweetspot between ease of use, ease of set up, security, redundancy? I feel like I am maybe too pranaoid to loose my data again (dropped a hard drive many years back, I lost all of my projects)

You're better than 95% of people just by thinking about this. For backups, identify which data you want to back up and do that. If you don't want to deal with Ansible right now, just set something up manually and automate it later (paste your commands into a readme for reference)For me, I make sure to backup my Nextcloud data. That included personal photos, files and other hard to replace stuff. Other than that I have daily VM backups to a Hetzner storage box and my NAS. I don't backup my media on Jellyfin, that's just not as important.VMs also make it easy to replace your host. Just install the hypervisor on a new server and restore VMs to it.

• maybe overall, how do you manage your perfectionism?

I guess I'm not a perfectionist. It took me multiple months and monetary incentive (avoid renting two servers) to migrate from my Debian single host setup to VMs years ago.Some of my Ansible playbooks are "version 1", where I didn't know what I was doing. I'm on version 3 now. They still work, I even use some of them occasionally, just haven't taken the time to migrate them yet.Maybe you can take a similar approach with some of your services that aren't that essential and spread out the work more so you can enjoy it when you want to.