Or maybe an automated system flagged it and an underpaid and overworked employee in a third world country reviewed it.

I don’t think this was malicious, these app reviews are being done by an overworked and underpaid employee in some third world country. Mistakes are made all the time.

It could have been worse. The romans had the day divided into 24 hours, like we do, but the hours varied in length so that from sunrise to sunset, you would always have 12 hours.

Imagine if that was the agreed upon time system, and we had to program that into computers.

Make a plan. Think about how much storage you need, whether you need redundancy and backups, and what server applications you need to run.

Here you also need to consider how much time you want to spend on maintenance. Premade solutions like Synology are set and forget. Using NAS operating systems mean having to do regular updates. Using just Linux is also an option if you want full control and are confortabile with the command line, but it’s more work.

Then step 2 is getting the hardware.

My recommended route, if you want to spend the least amount of money, is to get a 2nd hand PC, preferably not pre-built (dells and hps have proprietary parts like power supplies). A 4 core cpu from the last 10 years should be fine, and 16gb of RAM is more than enough for most applications. SFFs or MiniPCs might be ok for nvme SSDs only, but if you want hard drives, get one that has enough HDD bays. Depending on what you find, you might need to replace a few things, like the power supply or case.

Servers are good and reliable and have nice features, like network management, redundant NICs, redundant power supplies, but are usually pretty noisy.