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I would find it interesting to see some old server hardware phased out and maybe purchase it for my home- office/lab. But I don't really know what to look out for, except for the gen4 hardware from 2017.

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Unless you'd have a dedicated room for your server, I'd advise you to go for workstation machines. Pretty much the same horse power with more affordable hardware without big noise issues. Also, in comparison to v4, Xeons E5 v3 are ridiculously low priced right now (e.g. ebay) and are one heck of the CPUs too. In general there're no substantial differences between the microarchitectures of the two (Haswell vs. Broadwell).

Agreed.

2U and especially 1U servers are much, much louder than normal computers. Shrinking parts means that the fans need to spin much faster to get sufficient airflow.

Many consumer Ryzen motherboards (and all CPU) support unbuffered ECC dram which is a great thing to have in a server. I use a Ryzen 2600 in a consumer tower. It's quiet, low power, and like 1/10 the cost of real server hardware.

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