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This might be a hot take but I think anyone running a homelab should take the time to learn enough kuberenetes to run their stuff inside k3s. It has a slightly steeper learning curve compared to just using docker compose, but you can get a lot out of it.

For one, I actually really like managing the infra and containers with terraform. It would be annoying to write everything by hand... But that's what claude is for. Using tf with k3s is very nice, especially compared to what it would look like with docker

Secondly, the way traefik works for controlling ingress with annotations on containers is really convenient. It puts the configuration in the right place... Close to the app, not the proxy. Not specific to k3s, but it's the default setup and it makes sense

Third, k3s setup is easy. I avoided kuberenetes for a long time for my own server because I thought it would be a pain to set up. Using k3s makes it easy. The only trouble I had at all was figuring out how to get it working with IPv6-only setups.