You can get used Enterprise drives on eBay if you want to got that way. Look for a seller with lots of sales, a good rating, and a reasonable return policy.
I would stay away from kubernets/k3/k8s. Unless you want to learn it for work purposes, it's so overkill you can spend a month before you get things running. I know from experience. My current setup gives you options and has been reliable for me.
NAS Box: Truenas Scale - You can have UnRaid fill this role.
Services Hosting: Proxmox - I can spin up any VMs I need and lots of info online to do things like hardware passthrough to VMs.
Containers: Debian VM - Debian makes a great server environment as it's stable and well supported. I just make this VM a docker swarm host. I managed things with Portainer for a web interface.
I keep data on the NAS and have containers access it over the network. Usually a NFS share.
I found passive activitys can help with that. Just sit down and watch a good show that is engaging. Even going to bed early but listening to an audio book or podcast.
I think part of the challenge we face is a larger hurdle to get engaged with a task. So we either need something very interesting or stressful enough to capture our attention. But once it has our attention, it tends to have our full attention. Also we so frequently have to solve problems in a rush because we put it off until the last minute we are familiar with that mode of operation.
If you want cheap new drives check out https://shucks.top/.
You can get used Enterprise drives on eBay if you want to got that way. Look for a seller with lots of sales, a good rating, and a reasonable return policy.