Am I wrong that proxmox takes over the entire machine?

I like cockpit because I can use the machine as a regular Linux machine. It happens to have some containers and VMs running in a very ad hoc way. It wasn't the plan to use it for hosting originally but now it is. And cockpit can be configured to use other machines as well, right? So it makes it easy to grow into a quick way to review all the machines without me planning out nodes and centralized control.

Perhaps I'm mistaken, but I assumed proxmox was better if you planned on using a machine solely for the purpose of running virtualized machines.

LCD/incus seem like they would be a good fit for the way I used cockpit; because you can script them easily using CLI tools, so figured adding a cockpit plug-in would be easy. And you can migrate those containers and VMs to another host server easily.

This is all my homelab and I'm not being very intentional about the way I run things. I love to spin up a new server and then if things get overloaded (like I run out of ram on the host) I can easily move that server to another machine.

I have a bunch of host machines that are my kids gaming machines. They are basically unused during the day. ;)