I personally think of a small DIY rack stuffed with commodity HDDs off Ebay with an LVM spanned across a bunch of RAID1s. I don't want any complex architectural solutions since my homelab's scale always equals 1. To my current understanding this has little to no obvious drawbacks. What do you think?
This has been my journey.
I started with pure docker and hostpath on an Ubuntu server. This worked well for me for many years and is good for most people.
Later I really wanted to learn k8s so I built a 3 node cluster with NSF managed PVC for storage, this was fantastic for learning. I enjoyed this for 3 plus years. This is all on top of proxmox and zfs
About 8 months ago I decided I'm done with my k8s learning and I wanted more simplicity in my life. I created a lxc docker and slowly migrated all my workloads back to docker and hostpath, this time backed by my mirrored zfs files system.
I guess my point is what are you hoping to get out of your journey and then tailor your solution to that.
Also I do recommend using proxmox and zfs.