I run my own Dendrite server and have had it work pretty well.
Initially I chose Dendrite over Synapse as I heard about Synapse being quite heavy in terms of load, and my overall experience with Dendrite has been pretty good!
I run the server just for myself, but have it setup with Signal and Messenger bridges that work flawlessly (apart from one time when Facebook thought my account was hacked and had to reauth!)
I would rate it 8/10 for ease of install, especially with the docker setup it is pretty easy.
Only slightly annoying setup task was getting the matrix bridges setup as you need to mess with some config and I had some issues getting it to work initially.
But once it was all setup, pretty solid for me ever since!