You can put it on a separate VLAN with no internet access and watch it via your own app eg Home Assistant, Frigate, Zoneminder or whatever.
Making automations and scripts is getting easier every update, but it has a small learning curve as the logic can get complex and you sometimes need to know details like entity IDs or raw states. And there are some simple missing features that some people are very used to. Home Assistant is improving that sort of thing constantly, but sometimes the device APIs do not allow all functionality without the OEM apps.
For example, the two biggest camera-related things that are missing in my opinion is that the camera viewer does not allow zoom or two way talk. It uses the native browser media player, and on both a Samsung tablet and all iOS devices, this means that you cannot zoom and pan around the image. This is obviously not an issue if you embed a dashboard such as Frigate into the HA UI, which IIRC supports both two way talk and zoom. But YMMV.
Home Assistant is quite a beast but start off simple and work on. It will repay you every step of the way. The first hurdle is to get it on the internet and usable via the app. Get that sorted and you are well on your way.
Make use of dynamic DNS to register a name to IP address and Lets Encrypt to sort out a SSL cert. There are add ins for both of those.
You can also subscribe to Nabu Casa and external access and a few other things will be taken care for you. 31 day trial and https://www.nabucasa.com/pricing/