Terminals are powerful and flexible, but still slower than a dedicated UI to see states at a glance, issue routine commands, or do text editing.

Terminal absolutists are as insufferable as GUI purists. There is a place and time for both.

You should perhaps skim through https://docs.docker.com/storage/ quickly. That document explains that docker containers only have very limited persistence (this is kind of the whole point of containers). The only persistence of note is volumes. This is normally how settings are saved between recreating containers.

As for dependencies, well it’s possible that one container depends on the service of another. Perhaps this is what you are describing?

Either way, for more detailed help, you will have to explain your setup with more specific technical details.

No one else uses the term “cloud” like that.

That part of this comic really stuck out like a sore thumb. I can’t tell if it’s an oversight, a comment about the challenges of self-hosting, or subtle mockery of self-hosting hypocrisy.

This a 1/1000 likely outcome. Bankrupted companies will typically sell assets including IP and software to other companies to pay creditors (which excludes open sourcing them). And well before bankruptcy, any financial issues will cause Plex to be modified to support shitty monetization to the point that you won’t want the source code amyway.

Sorry for the bad outlook, better that you be ready than to hope for a unicorn.