This could almost be me. The main difference is my "server" is an off-lease Dell Micro PC that I maxed out the RAM on running ProxMox with a mix of VMs with everything stored on a Synology NAS all sitting in my basement office closet. I have tailscale setup so I can access it remotely.
Easier to mess with or reinstall OS remotely if you're not sitting in front of it, I'd imagine. Also can be easier to back up the whole system or take a snapshot of the system state, or nuke it and start over if you really screw it up.
I've dabbled with VMs for test environments but generally just install on bare metal.
I have about a dozen VMs running on a couple of large-ish servers (16 cores, 128 gigs RAM, 8 TB storage) Many of these are small, experimental environments (8 gigs RAM max, few hundred gigs storage) Running all those on metal would be expensive and annoying.
