I skimmed through the article, and see no mention of DEC Alpha VMS, which is NT's predecessor, which is really disappointing. Great read though, very well done.
DOS and Win3.1 really have little to do with NT. A DEC Alpha team was laid off around 1990, MS hired them, and NT is the result. Mark Minasi (I think, may also have been his partner, who's name I can't remember) wrote an article about 1998 in Windows Magazine (NT Magazine?) about it, and broke down the components of both NT and Alpha to demonstrate the similarity.
I've been looking for the article for a couple years now.
Staggering to me how many people don't see this, and denigrate populism (not that I think you do, clearly those commenting on this issue see what's going on).
The other cost to home lab serving lots of data is internet limits.
My internet will throttle after X terabytes (I forget the limit), whether upstream or down, and of course upload is slower.
It's like playing a game of tetris with costs, performance, stability, reliability, flexibility, privacy, security, and personal effort.
I'm not saying don't have a home lab, just that there are things to consider. It's worth the effort for me, though I'm working to move some things to cloud storage (e.g. Hetzner/Storj.io) and a VPS to get some of the bandwidth off my connection, and remove my home internet as a bottleneck or failure point.
They become Tupperware lids