but really, in what way would 32 cores become useful in a home server, except running a bunch of VMs that do nothing or donate money in terms of electricity to folding@home
Things like "what's the best 32-bit number for my custom random number generator" ?? (Try all 4-billion+ 32-bit numbers and run statistics on them, then sort the results). Except not really, that kind of search takes less than 10 seconds now, lol. But that should give you an idea of the size / scale of modern CPU power.
Or searching for chess or other AI search tasks. Or deep learning. Or raytracing. Or LTSpice simulations. Or... you get the gist.
Now the value of a private cloud is a subjective question, true, but personal experience suggests having it right there on home lan encourages practical use, especially in a shared flat.
The same setup with a more reasonably priced consumer proc (but no ECC) would be around 1.5k out front.