found that it did NOT seem to get along well with consumer grade hardware at all.
This is very correct. It's not that it cannot be made to work, it's more that VMware has very little interest in making (for example) Realtek ethernet cards work, because we know from firsthand experience that they suck.
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Through ESXi 6.7, VMware allowed the use of certain Linux drivers for various devices through the use of a compatibility shim layer. That ("officially") went away in 7.0, and AFAIK the hack workarounds for desperate types went away entirely in ESXi 8.0. For additional PITA bonus points,
VMware has deprecated a bunch of older CPU support, including Sandy, Ivy, Haswell, Broadwell, and Avoton. This is very disappointing to those of us who have traditionally shopped the older generation stuff to cherry pick great deals from off-lease datacenter gear. I still recommend that as a strategy, however. VMware had good reasons for this and gave us effectively an entire major version's worth of warning that deprecations were coming. I don't really expect that they will get super-aggressive with further deprecations in the near future, because they do stand to lose some customers to Proxmox.
And so, while I am not a particular fan of Proxmox, I will point out that a lot of older gear that is now ESXi-deprecated may still be supported by Proxmox. There may be more of a learning curve and fewer safeguards. ESXi has an awesome HCL system with detailed driver and firmware requirements; if you find stuff on the HCL and meet the driver and firmware specifications, that device is VERY likely to work. So like this,
the HCL entry for the Dell PERC H740P. This does not seem to be the case with Proxmox, which is more of a "based on Linux" mentality that I associate with more of an amateur/hobbyist product. This is not to imply that it's going to be crashing all over the place every few hours, but some of us run gear thousands of miles away and cannot be constantly babysitting it when it PSOD's.
In my experience, most server-oriented systems run ESXi just fine, so if you can find a post-Broadwell system with storage and network controllers on the ESXi HCL, then Google around a bit to find out what comments (if any) homelabbers have on it, you have better than normal odds. You can also focus on prebuilts from Dell if you like, since Dell owned VMware until just recently. Usually highly compatible. I am going to stick my head out of my wheelhouse a bit and go so far as to say that anything that has been known to run ESXi well in the recent past will probably also run Proxmox just fine as well, so that's like Supermicro X9, X10 gear that got deprecated in ESXi 8.0.
Maybe it's a bit off topic for this board?
That's still fine. We do have an off-topic forum and if this thread goes that way too far, it can be moved.
