I finally pulled ESXi off the homelab box this weekend and put Proxmox on instead. It wasn't a protest, just a tidy-up that had been pending for months. ESXi had served me fine, but the free tier kept getting narrower and the management story increasingly assumed I wanted vCenter, which I very much did not.
The migration itself was less dramatic than I'd feared. I exported the VMs I cared about as OVAs, stood Proxmox up on a spare SSD, and imported them with qm importovf. Two needed their disk controllers nudged from SCSI to VirtIO before they'd boot cleanly, and one Windows guest sulked about activation for a day. Everything else came up first try.
What I actually gained: ZFS on the host without paying for it, LXC containers for the small always-on bits that don't deserve a full VM, and a web UI that doesn't fight me. The thing I'll miss least is the Flash-shaped hole where the old ESXi client used to live.
It's Debian underneath, which means when something breaks I can reach for tools I already know rather than a closed appliance. That, more than any feature, is why it's staying.