I have been self hosting a matrix setup for a few years now, using the spantaleev ansible playbook. It does require updates roughly once a year to keep up with changes of the 3rd party chat APIs. Generally that involves logging into the server and running 'just update' followed by 'just install-all', but occasionally there are changes that need updates to the playbook as described in the release notes. In the worst case, if one of your bridges does go down you can always fall back to the vendor client for that protocol until you get the bridge updated.

Overall it has been absolutely rock solid, and the new element x app has been night and day compared to the old one.

Feels a lot like the days of using Pidgin chat, but since the bridges run on the server you only need to authenticate once instead of going through the process for every device.