I encourage homelabers to set up email servers and to play with them. Doing all of that will help a lot and you will learn a lot for sure.
It’s mostly the bureaucratic stuff that’s the killer here I think. Without putting in an effort to do the constant spam list appeals you can never be confident that your email makes it into people’s inboxes. Sure you could test with Gmail, but you can’t test for all of the smaller email hosting providers that mostly use a combination of spam assassin and spam lists.
Without confidence I don’t think it would be wise to use email in “production”. If you only use email to receive notifications it might make sense to self host. But if you need to reliably, timely, and confidently send out messages the downsides of self hosting are rough.