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?
You’re absolutely right on all counts.
That said, my RAID setup is on a Synology, so it’s brain-dead simple and not especially prone to falling over.