You're mistaking the consumerist urges that a lot of people partake in their hobbies and the idea of a homelab itself. A homelab can be overspec'd ubiquiti gear or it could be a RasPi running a bunch of services. It's just one or more servers that sit on your home network that you can fuck around with. Yeah, I guess something you care for stability with doesn't necessarily constitute the "lab" distinction, but a lot of times these stable things come out of experimenting in a homelab.

My "media server" (browser and downloaded media played via smplayer on a stock Ubuntu install) emerged from an experimental server running a lightweight distro that I used to do anything and everything from. Once I found that which parts of the media usecase fit into my partner and my lifestyle, it graduated to a stable decently-specced Ubuntu machine that is rarely touched other than for updates and downloading new content.