easier, harder, or stayed the same

none of the above, as it has most likely become impossible for me; the [incredibly small] node I used to run lived in the cloud, in the spare capacity of an overprovisioned server that I got laughed at for even daring to wonder how much it cost...

meanwhile, my NVMe controller reached higher temperatures than the CPU die [i.e., the compilation used an amount of memory swappable for background processes although not prudently useful for single monolthic tasks] from the first efforts towards compiling Alby hub locally, after the invocation from their README for obtaining precompiled docker images failed to even download them for reasons that are, honestly, not my job to fix.

obviously, the simplest next step is to abandon Alby hub [at least, for the time being], and look into alternatives built of separate small composable components.