If you end up not liking (or not wanting to learn) k8s, check out Hashicorp's Nomad. I set it up recently, it's great for a homelab, and a bit more flexible than k8s because it can also run raw executables and VMs.
Consul + Nomad makes for an excellent home lab setup, using docker, podman, raw binaries, etc, as you observe. It strongly recommends 3-node cluster, but works fine on a single host if you don't need the distributed / HA aspect. We've been running it in production at work for a couple of years and it's been rock solid.
The big problem with Nomad is that it's not as popular as k8s -- so while you can leverage docker hub, there's fewer oven-ready packs for more complex systems, eg cortex metrics or mimir, as current challenges for us.
Hashicorp is building up a public repository [1] which is great to see, but it's a long way from having the same scope as the collected repositories of helm charts.
[1] https://github.com/hashicorp/nomad-pack-community-registry
Between CNI, Consul Connect, and Traefik, we have hit some stumbling blocks, but nothing we can't do, yet.
As to dynamic load, yeah, we've mostly been using Nomad for HA -- are there some surprises in store when we start playing with the autoscaler?