I've run free ESXi on the homelab host for a couple of years and it was fine, right up until it wasn't. The thing that finally tipped me was the management story. The free licence gives you the hypervisor and the web client, and not much else. No proper API without paying, no easy way to script a backup, and a vSphere client experience that assumes you'll buy your way out of the gaps. For a single box in a garage, that's a lot of ceremony.
So at the weekend I wiped it and installed Proxmox VE instead. The migration itself was the boring kind: export the handful of VMs I cared about, recreate them as KVM guests, attach the disks, boot, fix the network names. An afternoon, mostly spent waiting on disk copies.
What I gained is the part I actually wanted. ZFS on the host with snapshots I can take from a cron line. LXC containers alongside full VMs, so the lightweight stuff stops eating a whole kernel each. And a web UI that doesn't hide the useful bits behind a licence tier. Backups are a checkbox now instead of a side project.
What I lost is genuinely a shorter list. ESXi's hardware compatibility was stricter but more predictable, and I'll miss exactly nothing else. If you're running free ESXi at home out of habit, it's worth a Saturday to see what the other side looks like.