Selfhosted
A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
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A DIY solution like your home server is great. I'm just adverse to recommending it to someone who need to ask such an open ended question here. A premade NAS is a lot more plug n play.
Personally I went with an ITX build where I run everything in a Debian KVM/qemu host, including my fedora workstation as a vm with vfio passthrough of a usb controller and the dgpu. It was a lot of fun setting it up, but nothing I'd recommend for someone needing advice for their first homelab.
I agree with your assessment of old servers, way too power hungry for what you get.
I feel like that has more to do with the complexity of solving your use-case in software rather than anything to do with the hardware. It'd be just as hard on a pre-built NAS as on a DIY build; though perhaps even worse on the pre-built due to shitty OS software.
Agreed - my use-case would be "24/7 server + gaming vm on demand with my monitor and peripherals connected to the gaming vm" and I doubt that is what most are going for.
The reason I mentioned my own build is because I consider putting all the components together to be a step up in complexity too, when compared to going pre-built. For someone who is comfortable with building their own PC I would definitely recommend doing that, the ability to tailor the hw to your needs is so much greater. :)
I think I'd split that into two machines; a low power 24/7 server and a on-demand gaming machine. Performance and power savings don't go well together; high performance machines usually have quite high idle power consumption.
It'd also be more resilient; if you mess up your server, it won't take your gaming machine with it and vice versa.
I'd recommend that to someone who doesn't know how to build a PC because everyone should learn how to do it and doing it for the first time with low-cost and/or used hardware won't cause a great financial loss should you mess up.