>The fiasco you can cause when you try fix, update, change etc makes this my favourite too.

I think some of the difference between "self-hosted" vs "homelab" is in the answer to the question of "What happens if this breaks end of the day Friday?" An answer of "oh merde of le fan, immediate evening/weekend plans are now hosed" is on the self-hosted end of the spectrum, whereas "eh, I'll poke at it on Sunday when it's supposed to be raining or sometime next week, maybe" is on the other end. Does that make sense? There are a few pretty different ways to approach making your setup reliable/redundant but I think throwing more metal at the problem features in all of them one way or another. Plus if someone moves up the stack it can simply be a lot more efficient and performant, the sort of hardware suited for one role isn't necessarily as well suited for another and trying to cram too much into one box may result in someone worse AND more expensive then breaking out a few roles.

But probably a lot of people who ended up doing more hosting started pretty simple, dipping their toes in the water, seeing how it worked out and building confidence. And having everything virtualized on a single box is a pretty easy and highly flexible way get going and experiment. Also if it's on a ZFS backing makes "reset/rollback world" quite straight forward with minimal understanding given you can just use the same snapshot mechanism for that as you do for all other data. Issues with circular dependencies and the like or what happens if things go down when it's not convenient for you to be around in person don't really matter that much. I think anything that lowers the barrier to entry is good.

Of course, someone can have some of each too! Or be somewhere along the spectrum, not at one end or another.