towerful

A technical reason is because he has been a president before

I have 3nm ~in my pants~

I would say the more regular expiration and renewal of an LE cert is better.
It's an ongoing check instead of an annual check.

At the homelab scale, proxmox is great.
Create a VM, install docker and use docker compose for various services.
Create additional VMs when you feel the need. You might never feel the need, and that's fine. Or you might want a VM per service for isolation purposes.
Have proxmox take regular snapshots of the VMs.
Every now and then, copy those backups onto an external USB harddrive.
Take snapshots before, during and after tinkering so you have checkpoints to restore to. Copy the latest snapshot onto an external USB drive once you are happy with the tinkering.

Create a private git repository (on GitHub or whatever), and use it to store your docker-compose files, related config files, and little readmes describing how to get that compose file to work.

Proxmox solves a lot of headaches. Docker solves a lot of headaches. Both are widely used, so plenty of examples and documentation about them.

That's all you really need to do.
At some point, you will run into an issue or limitation. Then you have to solve for that problem, update your VMs, compose files, config files, readmes and git repo.
Until you hit those limitations, what's the point in over engineering it? It's just going to over complicate things. I'm guilty of this.

Automating any of the above will become apparent when tinkering stops being fun.

The best thing to do to learn all these services is to comb the documentation, read GitHub issues, browse the source a bit.

Bitwarden is cheap enough, and I trust them as a company enough that I have no interest in self hosting vaultwarden.

However, all these hoops you have had to jump through are excellent learning experiences that are a benefit to apply to more of your self hosted setup.

Reverse proxies are the backbone of hosting and services these days.
Learning how to inspect docker containers, source code, config files and documentation to find where critical files are stored is extremely useful.
Learning how to set up more useful/granular backups beyond a basic VM snapshot in proxmox can be applied to any install anywhere.

The most annoying thing about a lot of these is that tutorials are "minimal viable setup" sorta things.
Like "now you have it setup, make sure you tune it for production" and it just ends.
And finding other tutorials that talk about the next step, to get things production ready, often reference out dated versions, or have different core setups so doesn't quite apply.

I understand your frustrations.

It's good to document weird and creepy behaviour.
If things like this don't make the news cycle, they essentially go un-called-out. Which might make it seem like normal or acceptable behaviour.

Weird behaviour doesn't live up to scrutiny

I've been meaning to play with rust, and I've always enjoyed tinkering with various MCUs... Although I'm not very strong with firmware/embedded programming.

Do you think programming an ESP32 is a good project for learning rust?
Any suggested place to start? (Tutorials, YouTube Vida etc)

In France, no one spoke English even though I spoke loudly and slowly

Haha, reminds me of a holiday ages ago in France.
Someone left their handbag behind or something, and my friend said "I'll sort it out, I know French". To be fair, he did. But when I went back to tell him where we ended up, he was speaking slowly and loudly to the poor french person.

Which reminds me of another time in France, having breakfast. I ordered "orange juice" and the waiter looked confused. So I said it again slower, and his face lit up and said "ah, jus d'orange".

Yeh, but my ZFS partition is a COW

The lack of informed consent is what makes this unethical.
Informed consent is a key aspect of clinical trials

Absolutely right, that should be 20 years. I guess I'm already preparing for my 40s

I'm late 30s.
I can't remember <13. So, at least the last 30+ years I've had 4 pairs of sunnies. Maybe 5 pairs.
I've still got 2 of those pairs.
I'm tempted to get a fancy pair that look good instead of just sunnies that look good enough (ie, more than $100). I just don't wear them enough... Maybe a couple weeks a year?
What's the point in buying good sunglasses, and why would I lose a pair?
I've had the same wallet for 15 years, I've been locked out once, and I've lost my phone about 3 times (all of which I've got my phone back).

I'm recovering from about 10 years of undiagnosed depression. Recently (like a year) it has affected my short term memory, to the point I thought I had ADHD or something else. Effecting my work, my ability to live day-to-day, my socialmlife.
I now realise, while ADHD might be a factor, undiagnosed depression has devastated who I am VS who I think I am and who I want to be.

Are there other explanations for your forgetfulness?
Is it age related? Anything else you find you are forgetting?