I've moved the homelab host from the free build of ESXi to Proxmox VE, and the only regret is not doing it sooner. The free ESXi did the job for years, but the free tier is deliberately hobbled: no API without paying, no built-in backup that I'd trust, and an increasingly grudging relationship with consumer hardware and its NICs.
Two things sold me. First, ZFS as a first-class storage option, with snapshots and send/receive built in, so backups and rollbacks stop being something I bolt on and become something the platform just does. Second, LXC containers alongside full KVM VMs on the same host. Most of what I run at home doesn't need a whole virtual machine, and a container with a fraction of the overhead is exactly right for it.
The migration itself was mostly tedious rather than hard: export the VMs, rebuild the host on Proxmox, import the disks, fix up the network bridges. An evening's work. What I have now is a host I can actually script against, a backup story I believe in, and a web UI that doesn't try to upsell me to a licence on every other page. For a single-host lab it's the better tool, and it's free in the way that actually means free.