This is the right way, but you will have to deal with FOSS devotees grumbling because your software doesn’t meet the OSI’s definition of open source.

I’m torn; ideologically I like the idea of “open means open,” but in practice that seems to result in corporations taking endlessly from FOSS while giving little to nothing back (or giving nothing but bug reports). How do projects like Blender get away with it?

Batocera, perhaps? It’s essentially ES-DE as a distro plus Kodi, which can interface with Jellyfin using a plugin.