You are correct – There is no add-on store. Having the add-on store can definitely be a great advantage, especially for new users. However most anything provided by the add-on store can be installed and configured separately. For example, ssh and samba are both provided by FreeNAS – So there is no need to have seperate “add-ons” for these.
– In terms of Home Assistant Add-ons, these are just separate containers, and specifically with the “Home Assistant Supervised” you get the ability to manage and have basic configuration of these separate contains through Home Assistant.
– In this setup you would be looking for other FreeNAS plugins. Two common examples, there are FreeNAS plugins for Mosquitto and Node-Red. Using the FreeNAS plugins will be more along the line of a manual setup. Also there are very few FreeNAS plugins compared to the number of Home Assistant Add-ons.
I see you have already found this post about about running Home Assistant Supervised on FreeNAS. Are you switching to use this approach instead?
If you are going to stick with the FreeNAS plugins I can help you get Samba share working
Is this for remote access? I had this working several years ago, I don’t remember it being terrible to setup. I’ll have to look for the link I followed. Honestly, I have been supporting HA through NabuCasa since it started. I realize it may not be for everybody, but in my opinion it’s the best way to both support Home Assistant and get secure remote access that just works.