I've said this to any of my engy friends who will listen. (not many) There's a small, yet tangible benefit to having a blank hardware slate to just riff on an idea when it strikes you, and having ample compute/storage/bandwidth to play with the idea. Or to send yourself down a spaghetti sysadmin nightmare you get to untangle. :)

It's been a consistent part of my career since 2007 and I'd hate to not have it. Homelab is great, but spinning up your own VMs, architectures, all of it... is a superset of that same satisfaction.