Being able to find and read software documentation and knowing how to use the tools that automate software deployment are why SRE/devops/cloud guys get paid the big bucks.
I definitely recommend synapse over dendrite or conduit btw. dendrite and conduit have a bunch of missing features, and my first attempt at dendrite server shat the bed with its NATS store and died. I definitely recommend Synapse for all matrix servers going forward.
The .well-known entries I found were the hardest to test, since synapse doesn't provide a web server for them, and Element throws a fit if you don't have CORS set up exactly in the way it wants you to.
I mostly have my matrix server working now, with bridges even. However, Element randomly logs itself out on a daily basis which is really frustrating :/
The latest AMD cpus do have transcoding, but Amd transcode isn't very good and isn't very compatible with Linux.
You can pick up an Intel A310 single slot GPU for $100 and it has AV1 encode, which is something that the igpu QSV doesn't have. Works very well in my Epyc motherboard with 76 pcie lanes. I definitely recommend going with an ATX 1st gen Epyc cpu+motherboard if you want something that can do NVMe raid.