I do self-host but the amount of maintenance that physical machines require is a cost in itself.
You placed the laptop in a location where slowly but surely there is a dust build up in the fans? You get some issues.
Hard drives start degrading? You get some issues.
And so on, while I've been running some personal things off VPSs too and those never had a single second of downtime. My home machine is my pride and joy but for sure 1 day a year on average there is something. But much cheaper in terms of raw components and performance.
So, yeah, it makes sense if you want the things you run not become a side job/hobby.
I think you are underestimating modern hardware though I'd agree that it's more of a hobby than fire-and-forget of an VPS app.
That being said, it's really fun and claude code on nixos is excellent rn at doing all the boring grunt work while letting you remain in the "grand architect" position. Lastly, it feels really nice to have personal compute you can trust and good future investment as compute is increasing in accessibility and risk so self-hosting is really popping off right now.
Are you calling my hardware old? ;(