Aren’t vSphere licenses a bit expensive for the average homelab? I personally went with a larger former workstation with more cores and RAM, because I expect to only ever have a single node, even if I’d love to have a full cluster.
VMUG Advantage membership ($200/year) gets you a 6 socket, non-production license for basically the entire VMWare catalog.
For $0/year I can run Linux and ovirt.
That won't help you very much if the goal is to maintain familiarity with VMware products (which is the entire point of the VMUG licensing scheme).
I found recently that they got 500 bucks license for 6 CPUs now! I think it is doable since it is lifetime license (without updates though after a year(?)).
just the ESXi hypervisor is free for non-production use.