Every non-FOSS piece of software I've ever deployed slowly degrades over time as founders get greedy or need to recoup costs from investors. Plex is the canonical example. Linux is the canonical counterexample.

Sorry, I've been burned enough times by this now that if your software is not FOSS, I'm not deploying it. Your take is not a good look.

For an open source alternative, check out Focalboard [0]. Note however it is backed by a for-profit company, but the code is open and can be compiled from source (so you can thus remove all telemetry and paid upsell nonsense).

[0] https://github.com/mattermost/focalboard