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.