Oh hai Cameron!
I'm rebuilding my homelab [1] too, actually, but deprioritizing it while I stave off a wee spot o' burnout.
I'm excited to see that you're building on Talos; I am too! I used to use CoreOS back in the day, like 8-9 years ago or smth, on PXE-booted VMWare VMs, and I've always missed that cleanliness.
That's a large part of why I'm rebuilding right now - I based everything around Ansible + Terraform, and that's workable of course but working iteratively on a homelab leaves so much cruft around, can lead to incidental complexity, etc etc etc.
Anyway, I'm pumped to keep reading!