I can't even get the simplest thing answered, which is "what is the minimum required setup for k8s, if not using a hosted solution?

Most mininal is to run a cluster inside a docker container with KIND. 2 cores and 4G of memory should allow you to run some small workloads

I plan to use 3cp 3w nodes and utilize all resources available. Do I NEED external storage,

No. Storage is optional AKA stateless workloads.

do I NEED an external load balancer or can I use DNS-LB?"

I'm assuming you want to bootstrap an upstream k8s cluster with kubeadm. In that case yes you need load balancer to sit in front of your control plane nodes. You can use a project like kube-vip to function as the load balancer without introducing an extra machine. If you want to use an extra machine you use something like haproxy.

You can use DNS but it's not ideal for production without healthcheck - but for a lab go for it