Thats falls under the "doesn't have enough ram to be anything else" bit. Yes, they have a keyboard, but how am I going to run emacs+rust-analyzer or emacs+latex in what remains of the 2GB of ram after the OS takes its slice?

Your emacs doesn't run on your server!? You can ssh or vnc or even use gtk's web backend.

haha that is a good point. I could set up a development VM on my 1U and use this as a dumb terminal. That actually could be a pretty good set up and could easily fit in the ram constraints. Now I'm back to being on the fence.