I personally use my home lab to test and learn, and I try to mimic a corporate environment. I have multiple instances of DNS, proxy, etc and I have a “prod” and a separate “staging” k8s environment. I try as much as possible, without going nuts about it, to update and try new changes that might be breaking in the staging cluster.
A micro sized PC with an i5 and 8gb or ram can cost under 100€, and it’s way more powerful compared to a pi. Power efficient too. That’s what I used for a long time for my jellyfin server.