To be honest I’d buy a hypothetical fanless “MacBook Air Plus” with a modest M2 if only it supported 64 GB RAM. M1 is already significantly better than my 2019 16” MBP, and I’d much prefer the MBA’s thermals.
Went this route with my home server. Pn50 in akasa A50 case...8 core zen2, 64gb, passive cooling, 3TB storage fits under couch.
Can't quite compete with the guys running full rack home servers but in terms of self hosting it can do pretty much everything I need (big gotcha is not RAID friendly)