There's just so much value in the fact that I can run it locally, deploy it wherever, play with it and learn it for free and even feel safe enough to expose it

There's just so much value in the fact that I can run it locally, deploy it wherever, play with it and learn it for free and even feel safe enough to expose it publicly due to its maturity and backing. As long as I stick with the standards (remind yourself and your users "you build OpenID Connect clients, not 'keycloak' clients," I can even (easily) move somewhere else if I want, and now I understand Oauth2/OIDC better and probably have a much more scalable authn/z system in place thanks to the way federated authn asks you to design your (fine-grained) authz.