For a lot of project "compiling yourself", while obviously more involved than running some magic install command, is really not that tedious. Good projects have decent documentation in that regard and usually streamline everything down to a few things to configure and be done with it.

What's aggravating is projects that explicitly go out of their way to make building them difficult, removing existing documentation and helper tools and replacing them with "use whatever we decided to use". I hate these.

I should have noted that I'll compile myself when we are talking about something that should run as a service on a server.

99% of the time it's just "make && sudo make install" or something like that. Anything bigger or more complicated typically has a native package anyway.

They didn't say anything about compiling it themselves, just that they prefer native packages to flatpak

edit: I can't read

Great that you have 4tb on your root partition then by all means use flatpack.

I have 256Gb on my laptop, as I recall I provisioned about 40-50gigs to root.

Yep that's all well and good, but what flatpack doesn't do automatically is clean up unused libs/dependencies, over time you end up with several versions of the same libs. When the apps are upgraded they get the latest version of their dependency and leave the old behind.