I just learned about the whole homelab thing a week ago; it's a much deeper rabbit hole than I expected. I'm planning to setup ProxMox today for the first time in fact and retire my Ubuntu Server setup running on a NUC that's been serving me well for last couple years.
I hadn't heard about mealie yet, but sounds like a great one to install.
I've had the same experience - I spent 6 months last year really digging into Rust and came to the conclusion that for the software I'm writing it's trying to save me from problems that I just don't run into enough to make it worth it.
I ended up jumping over to Zig and have been really enjoying it. I ported the same hobby 2D game engine project from C++ to Rust, and then over to Zig. A simple tile map loader and renderer took me about a week to implement in Rust and 3 hours in Zig. The difference was a single memory bug that took 15 minutes to figure out.
I dual booted Windows on my desktop and laptop for a few years and also noticed lots of weird issues - reduced battery life on my laptop, sleep/hibernate being broken, GRUB occasionally just dying on me. I eventually got rid of Windows all together and now just run Manjaro. I was surprised that suspend issues and battery life on my laptop, for instance, completely went away.
The main thing that kept me on Windows for years was games, but once I jumped into using Proton via Steam on Linux (and now the tweaked Proton GE), I can run almost all of my game library at full speed. The few games I can't play are due to anti-cheat software like Battleye.