Same arc here — Proxmox host with 5 Linux VMs, 2 Windows boxes, a Pi, all of it the "I'll get to it next weekend" pile that sat for two years. The thing that broke the dam wasn't the coding speed, it was no longer having to write the boring middle layer myself: apt upgrades across 6 hosts, auditing which containers had restart=unless-stopped, certificate rotation. I describe the goal, it does the SSH dance. Whether that's net good for my skills long-term I genuinely don't know yet.

I made it document it all too. So now that is effectively a skill which means next time I don't need to give it background on my home networking setup. If I want to check something myself, I can read that same document which is part of my Obsidian vault that gets synced to my phone via Syncthing. So I can basically connect to the pi via termux on my android and check stuff from anywhere.

Plus, time flies on train rides when you are watching a movie of your choice from jellyfin running on the pi. Very satisfying.