If you have another machine with a SSD or at least a fast-ish HDD and want to give it another go, you could try running k3s with an external datastore (e.g. postgres).

That's the setup I've been using on 3 x rPi since 2021 and I'm super happy with it as I can host all my own personal projects, some OSS ones (changedetection, n8n, etc), even longhorn for distributed storage and still have capacity left -- and this with just microSDs (to be fair, A1s, but still).