You could try Logseq, it's like Obsidian but open source. I use Obsidian for most notes and I also have a personal wiki built with Otterwiki.
I use NGINX for my reverse proxy, you could check out NGINX Proxy Manager which uses Certbot to automate the SSL certificates.
I've heard a lot of people also like Caddy and Traefik. Can't remember which is easier to use, maybe Caddy.
Yeah, I could never get NPM to work right on my system either. I use the NGINX Docker image and set up my certs manually.
If I were to do it all over again today, I would probably go with Caddy since it now has a bunch of that stuff built in with automatic HTTPS by default and the basic reverse proxy setup is literally 2 lines of code.