I won't be the first to admit that the rackmount hardware is a nuisance, but at the same time, it's relatively inexpensive since there's no practical reason to buy new hardware for a homelab and the IT renewal companies are absolutely overflowing with reclaimed hardware on the cheap. Also it's often easier to find hardware configurations that require no tinkering at all, verses having to slog through a PC build and hope that nothing goes wrong. My favorite hardware though are workstations and tower servers, since they're basically the best of both worlds - commercial machines with a decent amount of replacement parts with tool-less (or even hot) swapping and people with experience servicing them while still being fairly quiet at heavy load.

I've done it every other way - I have a dual chip Xeon Silver machine that I hand built, an IT reclaimed Dell rack server, three NUCs (used to be 4 but one bit the dust after 4.5 years of hard service), and a smathering of other hardware (NASes, 10G and 1G switches, etc.)...

After the absolute pain of the Xeon Silver build - having a brand new motherboard that was DOA and basically being told I was out $600 after multiple rounds of escalation, then having the replacement board fight with my GPUs, I'm not sure if I'm willing to bother doing it again. It would have been worth it to pay the markup on a gently used commercial machine and I would have been up and running faster... Probably would have been cheaper, in fact.