I would imagine that it might only work well for 2-3 friends, but I haven’t tried it. Hosting is built into the MineTest engine, and it runs much smoother than MineCraft, particularly when hosting on underpowered devices.
I routinely host 6 friends on my out-of-date laptop (while playing it, myself) and I’ve hosted 2 or 3 friends on my SteamDeck with no issues.
I run about 30 plugins full time, but you could scale back to fewer plugins, if needed, to tune the game to your available devices.