I guess if you want sync “headless” you are still stuck running Obsidian in a VM/Container so the main UI can work. It’s absolutely a step up.
I’d really like to hook the agents I interact with (Claude Code mostly, but also some stuff I’ve been working on for myself) into Obsidian, to use it as their “memory” so that I have an easy way to browse/edit it all. Obviously they can just work with the raw files (Obsidian or otherwise) but I like having all the “knowledge” inside where I already store my notes.