Yeah, I see that side of it too. I'm an Army officer, and there's an interesting phenomenon in our ranks. Officers who attend West Point live under some extreme restrictions, whereas officers who are products of ROTC and OCS tend to a have a normal civilian college experience. You can guess who gets into the most trouble after they graduate and enter the "real Army" with all the freedoms that young officers have. We have a long history of tinkering with how much freedom to give new enlisted troops during their basic training and specialized job training, trying to balance "discipline" with the fact that it's counter-productive for us to graduate new troops who immediately go wild when they get to their first real unit.

It worked well for me. Homeschooled until 7th grade. It helped me make friends, because I had no concept of cliques at the start. Also gave me a good "bullshit" meter for some of the crap public school has started teaching.

This was very much my observation of my nieces and nephews who went through that experience. They went all the way to adulthood home schooled, and the net result was they were wholly unprepared to be adults in modern society. They made it, mostly, but it was a rough couple years of adjustment.

On top of that, far from acquiring the values their parents hoped they'd get, they ended up with the reverse. Their attitudes are largely polar reversed from their parents, and they're incredibly resentful of having had those values pushed on them for the entirety of their childhood.

I've been through the whole gamut.

Homeschooling to private middle school was rough, mainly in my social circle going from a polite mixed-age group to a crass morass of the local rich kids. 18 months of that did more for my toilet humor repertoire than four years in the military.

Private to rural public school was a bit more relaxed. Less fistfights and emotional distress, but the academics were truly lacking - the district didn't have any more course material beyond Algebra 2 so I spent 8th grade math as a study hall. Chill, but ultimately wasted time.

Switched to a public charter for high school, and did a combination of home study and local community college courses. By that point I knew what I was "missing" from regular institutional education and was fine with the trade-off.

My own experience of transitioning from homeschooling throughout high school to a university degree in Mathematics/CS with honours was quite positive. I arrived at university with the personal drive to direct my own education and the wherewithal to orchestrate my own finances.

Admittedly, I was somewhat socially awkward until I met my wife, but it’s not clear that the social pressures of public school would have improved this. My interest in computers made me an outlier everywhere I went.

Homeschooling doesn’t have to mean social isolation. My own grade school children are confident speaking to senior citizens, adults, teens and other children alike, because they regularly socialize across their age groups. Being surrounded by people roughly your own age in school is an artificial construct that mostly doesn’t repeat thereafter.