I have been selfhosting Nextcloud now for five years (never tried selfhosting Owncloud). And you are right with the performance observation (I never managed higher upload speeds than 30 MB/second), the key difference is the application support.
One thing that bothered me for years is how to find photos you took a while ago. While Google and Apple offer smart features, with my selfhosted setup I was always depending on the date as only way to find photos.
The memories app for Nextcloud is a real game changer. Let me show you some of the features.
๐ธ Timeline: Sort photos and videos by date taken, parsed from Exif data. โช Rewind: Jump to any time in the past instantly and relive your memories. ๐ค AI Tagging: Group photos by people and objects, powered by recognize and facerecognition. ๐ผ๏ธ Albums: Create albums to group photos and videos together. Then share these albums with others. ๐บ๏ธ Map: View your photos on a map, tagged with accurate reverse geocoding.
There are many more apps, from simple tools to complete office environments. For me, this is the reason why I will continue using Nextcloud for the foreseeable future.
For me, it is easier than ~~smoking~~ smokeping. But smokeping offers more details by pinging the same host 20 times each run. This can help to discover packet loss.