Perhaps I was a shade too facetious. But honestly, you thought the Pi 3+ was so significantly different from the 3 that you imagined it might finally make your use case worth it?

I used a Pi 4 as a home server for literal years. For a lot of light work, the Pi works great, consumes very little power, and (before the 5) required no active cooling. I understand that if you're running machine learning pipelines at home, you might want a mini PC. But it feels like most developers severely overestimate how much CPU power you need to run most services.