Lol at the obsidian criticisms in the self hosted community :)
Couchdb is like 20 years old and not exactly ‘novel’
I setup a docker for his like 2 years ago and did nothing other than update once in that time. Live sync has otherwise been rock solid on multiple devices.
Obsidian not being open source is very valid criticism. The above 2 things really aren’t.
Just as an FYI its done like this because its vastly faster than flat files.
This is also the reason why NextCloud has lots of complaints about speed and files getting locked and not syncing properly.
Apps that are way faster (seafile, owncloud GO) use proprietary file stores.
Obsidian Live sync works extremely well and quickly to the point that the update speed is almost like a google docs with multiple editors. Couchdb is why.