too sharp a point apologies, but, some homelabs acquire gear, some acquire skill.

i don't see your claim about how much storage you have as any sort of technical claim, any proof of anything. i think it's expected that the homelab folk have an interest in going deep, in some areas. if networking isn't your bag, isn't interesting to you, fine. but the size of your storage cluster or how many vm's your running isn't really an interesting counter-claim.

To be fair, physically moving a small cluster of RPis around is a bit easier than moving 200TB. So a wireless linkup isn't that strange of a setup.

Homelab is a wide hobby. Some people assemble their lab to learn how things work as a way to skill up for work. Some people assemble a small lab (sometimes just a single box with a bunch of VMs) to run home automation or media applications.

Other people just enjoy the blinkenlights.

If you follow the homelab sub reddit, a lot of people like to run old obsolete datacenter gear.

You don't have to do that. Mine is a pair of Ryzen 2 white boxes. They are dead silent and don't put out much heat either. All my network gear is fanless too.

I do automation, so I use mine for dev/test against the stuff I am automating. A lot of it could run in the cloud, but that gets expensive real quick. Especially when I am working with a VMware stack.