The year is 2011. My wife and I have been living together for 2 years and she has generously allowed me to turn the back storage room of our then house into a home lab. The back room was a dodgy extension built after the house. I painstakingly ran network cable to the outer wall of the extension and into the main house. This itself was a blessing as there was NO INTERNET at the house. Mobile internet was prohibitively expensive back then, and the poorly maintained and overly long rural phone line we were on was incapable of establishing a working ADSL connection.
Our only internet connection was a point-to-point wifi connection we established with our neighbour who could establish a working internet connection - provided it didn't rain, or wasn't too hot. The only location we could get a working point-to-point connection was from that back room.
VERY makeshift Internet. Ubiquiti Bullet connected to a directional antenna, mounted to a torch (flashlight) covered in cloth to avoid scratches and aimed just so out the back window.
In short connectivity was inconsistent and even when it did work it was limited (sharing an ADSL link with the neighbour). This is my very long winded way to say I wasn't an early adopter of cloud computing or VPS solutions. I ran a home lab. Everything needed to work locally even if the Internet wasn't.
I had a rack full of old servers that I used to run labs at home after work.
I had space given over to tinkering and projects. Frankly it was almost always a tip, but it was my mess, for my projects.
There was something truly tangible about it all.
Fast forward 10 years to 2021 and I've finished putting together my version of a home-lab space in my home office (notice it's on the same timber cabinet). I've put together monitors and have accessories on hand ready to run up systems & labs. My office is cabled up such that I can get network and power from practically anywhere.
Unfortunately the space goes mostly underutilised except as a bench to place things on.
Why is that? For the most part: virtualization.
My desktop PC and laptop are both configured to run virtual machines. Lots of them.
My core home server runs ESXi (yes, I built it well before Proxmox took off) and even running 6 virtual machines constantly it barely touches the CPU with RAM really being the biggest constraint. 
Of course if I really need to get my hands on tons of grunt (more than possible with a VM on my desktop that runs a 5950X with 128GB RAM that is) I can always go with a cloud-hosted server of a VPS and just pay for what I need while I use it.
Much how LAN parties have faded away in to obscurity for many, I fear the same is happening with home labs. There's something wonderful about the chaos of a home lab, but the more I speak to recent technology grads or those working towards that title, the more I realise they're comfortable with docker containers, infrastructure as code or even serverless deployments - which I frikkin' love, but too many have never touched a home lab.
So where do I stand? Is my age beginning to show? Am I a fossil holding on to ideas from a bygone era or are we loosing another piece of the technology world? A piece that connects us physically with the machines and devices we use, rather than just treating them as logical concepts.