Honestly, it mostly runs itself day to day. The lab is powered off every night and cold-boots every morning, and everything comes back on its own: ArgoCD syncs from Git, CloudNativePG brings Postgres back, and the daily pipeline runs on schedule. That nightly restart is a good test that nothing depends on hand-applied state.

The tax is upgrades, not operations. Moving Kubeflow, Istio, Knative or Ceph one version means checking how each fits with the others first, and that's where the hours go. Managed services would remove most of that. I'd still choose the homelab, because the point is to learn where the parts connect, and you only learn that by owning them.