SheevaPlugs [0] circa 2009 were perhaps a better promise of the age of self-hosting.

The most important bit here is solid uplinks, though, not OSes or boxen. At least in the US, self-hosting was choked off by cable-tv-based ISPs who offered asymmetric bandwidth with highly restrictive upload speeds. Partly that was because cable technology was originally designed to distribute media from the culture industry to the consumer, not peer-to-peer; partly that was an artificial restriction designed to thwart piracy.

The world today would look very different if every home in the early 2000s had been equipped with equal upload/download bandwidth; small home servers might have been normalized.

A second problem, and one that macOS server would not have solved, was collusion by the email big hosts (Google, Outlook, etc) to impose in the name of fighting spam restrictions that keep individuals from hosting their own mailservers. ISPs, of course, helped there too by blocking ports. Locking most consumers in to centrally-hosted email servers was a surveillance state's dream come true. If you can't send emails without suitable DKIM reputation, and only the big players get to determine whether you're reputable, you can't self-host your e-mail, and that's a major blow to privacy.

I, for one, miss my early internet days of having an AIX box with all services on it. I could telnet (SSH nowadays) in from anywhere and read my mail, newsgroups, etc., and update my web page and work on whatever. It would be awesome to have that ability again but with a server in my own home.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SheevaPlug

so much this. even late 2000s had an upstream problem.

impossible to serve anything with ISP blocking common ports to save their precious upstream bandwidth in a cable network, which is mostly downstream.

i couldn't believe when i moved to a place that had newer DSL tech (one block from the ATT brick building holding the city repeaters, so zero latency baby!) and while cable was giving everyone way over 100mbps connections i was only on 3mbps, but zero latency and 3mbps up too against who knows what that best-case-100mps-down cable really had for up... i could setup servers, had all open ports etc. it was mind blowing and at the same time it's so stupid that it highlights how bad it was then. we still had T1s at work in 2005 iirc.