but I think there's a consensus around certain software not keeping its responsiveness acceleration on par with hardware capability acceleration, some of it driven by ideas like "everyone phone now has 8gb of ram, c'mon", but most of it by profit incentives on the other side, e.g. cloud providers.
I was really happy to discover proxmox (my micro-homelab is a dell mini pc, a mid-range asus gaming router, a 2-slot synology nas, and it's rocking)
then, hetzner (for workloads that cannot be hosted on my homelab), they have an outstanding performance for 3-5$ monthly. before that I used aws lightsail, digital ocean droplets, and before that I used google cloud. I basically started with the worst and ended up with the best, I'm quite sad about that as I've wasted so many hours learning the stupid GCP ui, which was buggy and convoluted af. basically I went on one of the worst paths in terms of devops/sysadmin leverage, wasting time on semi-non-transferrable skills. this was not my main job, though, it was mostly hobby projects but still