The official instructions do not scale nor do they work for all situations. But besides that, the problem is not that my bad setup caused a problem. Shit happens and I didn't blame anyone but myself. The problems is that when a problem occurs, one has to get lucky to get support. I don't have to even prove this. I know for sure a fact that there's lemmy instances that decommissioned because they followed the default setup, run into issues, got no support and gave up.

Edit: Also, man, from one Foss developer to another: You really have to learn to stop the instinct to say 'it broke because you did it wrong'. I know it feels unfair, but trust me, this is not the way.