Some people also refer to home servers as a "Home Lab" which can be a place to try ideas and and learn new interesting technologies. For the longest time I didn't have a home server, and didn't really see a need for one and preferred to hosting on a dedicated server that was remote, but once I learned about Home Assistant that all changed. I realized how amazing it was to self host things at home and starting building out and designing a real home network with more services besides just Home Assistant!