Ok, that sounds like a solid recommendation for the NUC. I think I can live without IPMI, especially since this is the start of my homelab (besides my RaspberryPis)
I’ve heard a lot about proxmox and I will definitely try it out before any other solution. Running VMs and containers side by side is a great plus.
At this point I haven’t really looked at the router-with-custom-firmware game. I heard about openWRT and OPNsense, but I definitely need to do some research on that. Interesting site, though it looks terrible on mobile.