Hard disagree. You can have incredibly complex infrastructure (whose maintenance necessitates an FTE) running on a single VPS. Some of the smartest infra consultants I've met have point blank said "you shouldn't implement a fleet of cloud microservices for that, I can implement this whole stack on a single machine if I'm efficient about the architecture and underlying algorithms."

My point is that none of these coworkers have ever been at that stage. He was surprised about me hosting something because he seems to think hosting is expensive and for companies. Straight in at the top end of k8s and microservices

There's plenty of people that got a CS degree and went to work and this is only a job for them, they have no interest outside of work. Unfortunately I'm not one of those people so I get off work troubleshooting issues to troubleshoot issues at home lol though there aren't that many just my choice to self host cameras through HomeKit sometimes falls apart somehow but im also squeezing every KB or RAM out of that beelink I can.

Don't get me wrong I don't think a homelab is necessary, but I think people who have only done this in a big corporate environment are doing themselves a disservice - either a small company or a homelab can fix that itch, but like you say a lot of people don't have the interest

It's like a developer who went straight from knowing nothing about programming to JavaScript and never looked back. They missed C, they missed assembly, they missed cycle counting, they missed knowing what your memory footprint is at all times in your application, they missed keeping your inner loops tight and in the cache... It's not just "oh this person doesn't have a nerdy hobby." These are real skill holes in [many] developers' backgrounds, just like knowing how to host something on bare metal+OS is a real skill hole for some devops people.