It's usually not a single weekend. If you're like me, it starts out with thinking it'd be nice to install Plex on an old gaming PC. A year later, it has organically grown into a rube goldberg machine of proxmox and home automation. Which I guess just reinforces your point.

Joking aside, a minimal setup just using docker compose is pretty manageable. Self hosting many projects is as easy as 'docker compose up -d', and upgrades are straightforward as others have pointed out.