How is it a waste of time to health check your self hosted services? I use these services. I need them to work and be available. Bookmark manager, media server, my note taking app, a book server for friends, a few Discord bots I run, I've ran long running game servers for friends and a couple of little apps, home automation with CV ran on premise. We're obviously doing different things and have different priorities, but you can't act like k8s and docker are overkill and fiddly simply because you haven't found a need for them yet. Imo it is a huge pain the ass to manage this stuff without good iac. It's never been easier to implement something that makes my life easier. Seems like an obvious choice when you reach a certain scale.

When I said I was a professional software engineer, I just meant that I have a lot of experience doing this stuff, so to set it up at home isn't really fiddly or cumbersome.