I would love to do something like this, but what happens if I don’t have kids? What happens if I one of them develop a IT background? Perhaps I could curate some pictures, videos, and documents that I feel are important (and not too sensitive) and send it to the Internet Archive so that extended family could always get it. Self-hosting is great until there is no more self.

OP is presenting to Adobe.com with an inability to combine two PDFs and a lack of subscription fatigue.

Have you tried the fork VSCodium? It strips out some of the telemetry and makes it more FOSS.