And know that virtually 100% of software will run on it, rather than having to hope there's an ARM build of it (which most major FOSS software does have, but there's still that slice that doesn't)

And even if you want to experiment with multi-node HA stuff, I personally prefer to do that with VMs than wrangling actual physical machines

i have a raspberry pi3 (4gb, 50 euros) and a pi5 (8gb, 100 euros). i run a k0s cluster (for fun) w/ pihole, plex, some monitoring and homeassistant. that for me is cost effective