Drama is pretty much non-existent; but when it happens, it can be a day or two where things are in a not-great state. Backups help a lot here, to easily get into a known working state -- also practicing restoring from those backups is a good exercise, so I don't mind it too much. There's nothing like learning your backup was missing some component or something, especially when the risks aren't high.

I think the worst drama ever was a partial disk failure. Things kinda hobbled along for awhile before things actually started failing, and at that point things were getting corrupted. That poofed a weekend out of my life. Now I have better monitoring and alerting.

I installed many Arch Linux for servers, they have been online for decades. There is no fuss. The only downtime was when I issued a reboot, but it was back in 5 seconds if not less.

So you really do not have to be bothered by installation or anything of these lines. You install once and you are fine. You should check out the Wiki pages of Arch Linux, for example. It is pretty straightforward. As for upgrades, Arch Linux NEVER broke. Not on my servers, and not on my desktop.

That said, to each their own.

I paid about that amount once for an ex-lease server which has been in use since 2017. A DL 380 G7 (24 threads, 128 GB) giving me all the freedom I want. A large solar array on a barn roof gives us negative energy bills so power use is a non-issue. If you have the space for the hardware and the possibility to offset power use using solar or just dirt-cheap electricity this might be a solution for you as well. There's plenty of off-lease hardware on the market which can run for many years without problems - in the intervening 8 years I have replaced one power supply (€20), that's it.