I have a professional 'homelab' and a personal 'homelab'. You're 100% right, they can be a time sink. The important bit is to make sure the time is setup not 'maintenance' time.

The trick is twofold: if it isn't 'declare and deploy' don't run it. If it isn't in your backup/restore pipeline don't run it.

Pfsense and Home assistant are huge pains in the ass. Everything else is easy breezy.

Proxmox/pbs/truenas/talos/linstor/DRBD are all amazing.

I'm thinking about ditching pfsense for tailscale/cloudflare tunnels, but it's not worth the time atm. I don't have a viable alternative for HA.