The issue here is that HikVision is a Chinese company, and they have been widely known to supply equipment to the government to aid in the suppression of the Uighur people.

You could also look for cameras that have an SD card slot built in, and configure recording directly on the camera. I use Milestone XProtect's free license at one site, and Synology's Surveillance Station at another.

If you want to record, you'll need to set up an NVR. I don't have any security concerns about them phoning home or doing anything nefarious, because they're completely segregated on their own locked down network. I have a bunch of Hikvision cameras (DS-2CD2342WD-I) that were about $120/each that I'm happy with. If you want remote access to the cameras while off your local network, you'll need to set up a VPN. It's definitely not plug-and-play, but if you have experience setting up networks it's pretty straightforward. Standard practice is to secure them by using a dedicated VLAN (so they can't talk to anything else on your network) and default deny firewall rules (so they can't get to the Internet or other parts of your network). They don't need any internet access to function. Once you step up from consumer level (Nest/Ring/Wyze) cameras, you'll find that nearly every IP camera supports the standard RTSP/ONVIF format.

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