I will assume that you will expand your homelab with time.
I will also assume that you’re not going to open ports from your home network to the internet. If you need to do that, come back here/research Cloudflare tunnels (I have an alternative to those but that will need some explaining).
Now, purchase a 4 port/6 port “Router Firewall” from Aliexpress. They’ll cost you $200 + RAM + SSD, but with that you’ll have an x86 router + switch (the celeron/pentium/i3s are plenty capable to switch without dedicated hardware). Get a TPLink/Mikrotik WAP and install OpenWRT.
Now, to bring my previous point into focus: you will place this router/firewall behind your consumer router. This will effectively place you behind double NAT, but if you’re using Comcast you shouldn’t care anyway (and it doesn’t matter unless you’re planning to expose ports).
How many drives do you need for your NAS? Look at Lenovo P310s and replace the PSU with your own. RAM + storage will be your biggest expenses in a homelab.
Use your gaming PC as a server, and get a Dell/HP/Lenovo mini PC for HA with it. Don’t even think about ESXi and jump straight into KVM/Xen. Bhyve if you’re brave/want to try something new.
Use Terraform/Ansible when you can, and nothing will terrify you anymore since you can literally rebuild the entire lab inside 15 minutes of you doing nothing but waiting.