For me at least it is 100% a hobby. Sure when I’m actually working I’m either running plasma or riverwm basically stock, but it’s genuinly really fun to see how “hollywood hacker” based I can get my desktop to look. It also helps me learn more about interacting with the inner workings of linux since I like to modify things myself instead of using other peoples dots. I even made a shitty terminal application launcher using pure fish cause I wanted to see if I could, and it taught me a ton about .desktop files and binary locations and flags. That information I now use daily building my own applications

Authelia + lldap(lightweight ldap) has been a really nice and powerful setup that negates the need for authentik for me. Authelia and authentik have diffrent goals tho, authelia is by design less powerfull and has a much smaller code base so that independent teams can audit the code themselves and a “set and forget” type configuration. Authentik is targeted at being an enterprise solution with all the bells and whistles. If you need those bells and whistles and dont want to use authentik try looking at keycloak (which also needs an ldap backend)