100g in the mountains? Where is this mythical place?

no

I am not sure some stamped tin and a few circuit boards are worth $1000.

IMHO this is just a $150 Rosewill RSV-R4200U with backplanes, so maybe $300 max.

I would MAYBE think about this if it came fully function certified system for $1000 that I could just drop drives into, but even then that is out of the typical homelab price point and entering the SHO market.

This is like asking why do you cook your own food at home.

I self host because I know what I am getting, I can control the price I want to pay, and I don't really need to involve other people in my life.

next up... docker containers start reporting user data

Never buy into a platform, they tend to waste a lot of my time on changing things to upgrade versions that have no point except to change the whole platform, and the things you like to use get deprecated. Or they never get to where you want to be. Your vision is not the maintainers vision. Learn to roll your own...everything.

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-chapin-rfc2606bis-00

I use .host because .internal is too long to type and .local is a pita, but mostly because the browser actually tries to go there instead of some stupid search engine that tracks that kind of info and I don't have to remember to put a slash at the end.

LOL

Is self hosted really meant for business? Do you mean like a coffee shop environment that people can spin up servers for themselves or what is the point? All the apps you pointed out work fine for selfhosted home and lanparty environments Most people that host servers want os compatibility and hardware speed. Docker isn't really known for its Windows compatibility that a lot of game servers need. Linux servers are more popular but a lot of the games people play have their servers on lockdown so this is really a niche market anymore.

Can I install Steam on it?