Not necessarily, paperless offers various sorting and cataloguing features, as well as rules and basic learning. If you spend time setting it all up, it should drive itself in time and search may only be a fallback mechanism.

It’s really useful where you can tell it ‘catalogue this as x, but also store it as y’. So, again, if done properly, you can move to another system with already well catalogued document structure.

Not everyone has time, skill, or desire to spend their nights learning how to build and configure a nas.
People have other hobbies than IT, so if a photographer wants to have a local storage for his portfolio without faff, I guess they can get fucked?
Really with your gatekeeping