you have to band with others to make it .. all the tools are there
I think I realized that in college when a friend tried to get me to run Gentoo as my first linux distro. I never made it to a desktop! I still run linux as my daily driver today, but I'm currently using Pop!_OS after having used Ubuntu since college. Because when I'm using my daily driver computer, I want to use it, not maintain it.
Sorry I'm not trying to stalk you across multiple threads, but this made me wonder if there's a market for contract SREs. Like you own a car but you take it for oil changes and tune-ups, you own a server but some admins SSH into it here and there when it needs fixing (puts an emphasis on encryption, maybe). I think it hasn't happened because there's not a huge difference between this and purchasing hosted services, but, maybe it's an interesting slightly different option.