In my case I wanted to separate my services between the ones accessible from the internet (git. lemmy) and not (bitwarden, *arr). To do this I need 3-4 VMs. I went with proxmox for the backups: you just define retention policy and that’s it. Promox drops backups of VMs automatically keeping the right amount of old versions. If you don’t want to split your services and you’re fine with just one VM I think you can easily go with pure debian. I did have some issues with proxmox (like failing network card, it required some fiddling) so it’s not “free”. There’s some extra work to get the benefits.

And I think having everything in one VM is also fine. I’m only splitting it because I want to have some things accessible from the internet. If not I would just use docker for everything.