Why are you bickering with me about it? I don't appreciate people asking questions in bad faith just so they can make a spicy comment. Think I like it?
There are choices, it's just they all suck unless you're willing to move. Nobody's arguing that it is a local semi-monopoly.
There's other options, but they're all MUCH slower. If you want a different ISP with comparable or faster speeds, you need to move. In my case, internet is bundled with HOA fees. And there is no other fast option available at my address anyway.
It's not a full monopoly. You can choose another ISP, but it's just that in practice you'd need to physically move to a new location to make that change of vendor.
Yes, I've done almost exactly this while traveling. You can even carry around a couple variously configured sd cards for different use cases. I had one with jellyfin for sharing locally and also Kodi for direct HDMI connection to TVs. There is a in app on Android for jellyfin called findroid that allows offline copies from the media server, which allowed me to not need the thing powered the entire time I wanted to watch something on my phone, just long enough to download it. Adding samba shares adds a other layer of accessibility. I had another SD Card with video game ROMs for retro gaming, but this one got left at home because it requires controllers and I didn't think I'd use it that much. I had another with "little backup box" installed for automatically backing up my photos and videos after a day out exploring with my camera.
I used a Raspberry pi 5 for all of this, running from a battery backup, because I didn't really need a keyboard once I had remote connections to my phone sorted out. Pick a rugged case and you case just toss it in your bag of chargers. It took up about as much space as a pack of cigarettes. Another option would be the Raspberry Pi 400, built into a keyboard. A little bulkier, but maybe more resilient in the face of technical difficulties.
I hate how modern journalism uses phrases to distance us from the harsh reality, like "mortality rates increased" instead of "people killed by government policy", "officer involved shooting" instead on "murdered by police", "abortion rights" instead of "human rights".
Battletoads look weird in boots.
For me it's, "Spectacles, Testicles, Wallet, and Watch".
Oh yeah, I totally support the local copy. That will save you in times up hardware failure or fuck ups. I could just never keep up with the maintenance and kind of gave up making automatic backups and syncing. But reorganizing often translates to integrating deletions into rsync or whatever syncing protocol you use, and that has caused me headaches and heartaches.
Yeah, that was a typo. Thanks, I'll fix it.
I have a very similar setup to yours, a relatively large music library around 1.7TB of mostly flac files on my server. I'm able to organize these files locally from my laptop, which at various times has run either OSX, various GNU/Linuxes, or Windows. However I do not bother pushing the files themselves back and forth over the network.
Even if I did, I wouldn't automate the syncing, I'd only run it manually after I'd done my organizing with Picard for that day. After all, it the organization with Picard isn't automated, why should the syncing be? I'd probably use rsync for this.
In actual practice I do this: Connect to my server from my laptop using ssh, forwarding X. Run Picard on the actual server through this remote connection. Picard runs just fine over ssh. Opening a browser from a Picard tag for occasional Musicbrainz.org stuff is a little slower but works. I would then use a tmux or screen session to run the rsync command when I'm done with Picard for the day for syncing to a backup if necessary.
I don't really bother keeping a whole copy of my music collection locally on my laptop or phone though, since It's been bigger than is practical for a long time. Managing multiple libraries and keeping the two in sync turned into such a hassle that I was spending more time organizing than actually listening (or making mixtapes/playlists). To listen to my music locally I've used either Plex or Jellyfin, sometimes MPD (like when my server was directly connected to my stereo receiver), or just shared the folder via samba and NFS.
Give em The Harkness Test
Short simplified answer: nobody wants to pay for the infrastructure. Especially in the last mile. There's probably a Planet Money episode about it. If not, there should be.