It's not that hard. You can literally use any old computer. I was home labbing long before I became a SWE. Something like Ansible can make deterministic bare metal config that could be accessible to more people.

The answer is community, the real, local, messy, annoying kind.

It’s theoretically possible for someone to be a one-man-band and know everything needed for modern life - but it’s exceedingly hard and rare, and even then they’ll fall short relatively quickly in specialized once-in-a-lifetime issues.

You don’t need to know how to replace a toilet (though you should) or other more complex plumbing tasks - but you can know a guy.

And the plumber doesn’t need to know how to run a homelab, just know a guy who can answer the questions.

Nobody in my family knows how to do the jellyfin stuff I do, but they all know how to consume it. And some will be interested and learn more.

Oh it's extremely simple: Make people care enough about privacy that they'll pay for it.

That's literally all it is. People so far have shown that they'd rather choose the cheaper thing than the private thing. If it were the other way around, the market would have provided.