I started with a basic as shit NAS and was happy with it.
Then i wanted Hardware Acceleration for my Plex Server because i wanted to stream high resolution content when i was out of the house.
I then rebuilt my old Gaming Rig into a server.
After i realized that i now have much more power to use i started to host a bunch of services; AdGuard, Plex, Sonarr, Radarr, Prowlarr, Overseerr, Homarr, Lidarr, SabNZBs, Kavita, Kaizoku, HomeBox, HomeAssistant, Nextcloud, FoundryVTT, PaperlessNGX, Audiobookshelf, Romm and Whisper for my HomeAssistant.
That’s stuff i would’ve never even had the chance to host on something simple like a little NAS.
Oh and most homelabs are NOT racks with 2 cores… in my case, old gaming PC with Ryzen 5 2600X, 16Gigs of Ram and GTX1660 Super