After just over 1 year, I can follow up and wholeheartedly say that this firewall appliance has been completely worth it:
Not a single freeze, reboot or issue > super quiet > runs cool in no AC home-office > uses very little power (watts) > wide compatibility with SPF+ sticks. If anything, it’s a bit overpowered for a homelab.
It was my first time using pfSense. Some quick things I learned (mistakes) that I can pass on are: Get the smallest size fast SSD/NVMe storage you can find! Lastly you only need 2 GB of RAM; don’t buy 8 GB! I hope this helps someone else search.
Now that I’m familiar with the hardware and pfSense, next will be replacing pfSense with https://opnsense.org.
The search began in February 2024.