I dragged my feet for over 2 years after building my homelab and not putting proxmox. I highly recommend you start out with proxmox right away. It has its quirks and learning curve, but it’s been a breeze after “getting it”.

At first I didn’t want the files inside LXC filesystems because I was used to manually poking at folders and such. But the periodic backup and restoration that gives you its the best, bar none.

I rebuilt my setup after a faulty data cable destroyed my btrfs raid0 filesystem (I know, I knew it was dumb, but I had 8tb at my disposal and I wanted to use it dangit!). Long story short, my borg-based Nextcloud AIO backups were borked and took like 3 days of research and external drive juggling to get some of the stuff out of them. With proxmox it’s a single click to get the whole thing back up and running.

Also you can use helper scripts as a sort of appstore, including turnkey appliances