I echo the other commenters, a NUC is a great beginner system for homelab; if all you want or need is minimal resources. For learning enterprise management or workloads, I’d say you need a full fledged server. There is nothing in common with a NUC and a Poweredge, for example. What is your homelab for you? A few VMs and one disk system attached to a COTS NAS? NUC will be fine. Wanting to learn to manage a Server with full on RAID, hot swap drives and 64G ram? You’re gonna want a server.