Plex user uses UID (998) in the special range , and is already assigned (not to plex) on my NAS

Nobody else has ever complained about this.
I think that if you use NFS and not try to piggyback on user plex, you’ll be ok.

You can customize PMS to not run as user plex

example

[chuck@lizum ~.2002]$ cat /etc/systemd/system/plexmediaserver.service.d/override.conf 
[Service]
Environment="PLEX_MEDIA_SERVER_APPLICATION_SUPPORT_DIR=/usb/plex"
User=chuck
Group=chuck
[chuck@lizum ~.2003]$