I run my homelab on NUCs as well but no hypervisor. Everything I run is in Docker containers. So the NUCs have CentOS installed and then just containers across the Swarm cluster.

Storage is an NFS mount from my Synology NAS.

The only reason I would really care to have a hypervisor is because then I can do more from Terraform.

I use Terraform to configure my DNS, my Ubiquiti gear, and the Swarm cluster but that leaves a gap where I need to do something to manage the actual CentOS machine. There isn't much to manage (users, SSHd config, SSH keys, packages such as vim, docker, and htop, and then NFS mounts) but the less I have to manage myself the better. Just don't think it's worth adding a whole hypervisor just to pull possibly some of the networking into Terraform.

Anyways, NUCs + Docker Swarm = great win.