This is exactly how I found myself building a homelab! I first upgraded the SSD in my MBP-2015 and that gave me a bit of relief, but I soon started running into RAM limits and swapping.
So I bought a beefier NUC (Ghost Canyon) and run ProxMox on it. I setup a NFS server in an LXC container, and then a typical VM for development[1]. In all it took me a couple of weekends to really get things dialed in nicely.
ProxMox is great, I really love that I can provision and throw away instances quickly! It makes for less variance in trying to establish what made thing X work suddenly.
[1]: I need kernel modules and the guest to have access to USB for my dev