I put Kubernetes on my homelab last autumn, and I should be honest about why. It wasn't because three NUCs running a handful of containers needed an orchestrator. It was because I use Kubernetes at work and wanted somewhere to break things without an audience. As a learning rig, it's been brilliant.
As a way to actually host things for my household, it's been daft. The household doesn't care about pod anti-affinity. It cares that the photo backup runs and the DNS resolver answers. I spent more evenings babysitting the cluster, etcd having a sulk, a certificate quietly expiring, a kubelet wedged after a kernel update, than I ever spent on the services it was meant to be running.
The maths is unkind. The control plane overhead, the YAML, the upgrade dance every few weeks, all of it to schedule about a dozen containers that never move and never scale. A single box with docker-compose and a restart policy would have given my family better uptime than I managed with a quorum.
So I'm keeping it, but I've been honest with myself about what it is. It's a lab, not infrastructure. The things people actually rely on are moving back onto something boring that survives me ignoring it for a month. I'll do my Kubernetes learning where a wedged node only costs me a Saturday, not the family's holiday photos.