TrueNAS is how I got my homelab start! What’s great is once you creat your zfs pool it’s pretty portable. Over the years I went from FreeNAS to Truenas Core to Truenas Scale and then back to Core but now as a VM. Never had any problems with migrating.
Do you have a home automation ecosystem picked out yet? Ie habitat, home assistant, etc? That will be where the logic of your automation lives. Seems like most tech savvy folks choose home assistant, but that will involve setting up a server on your home network, figuring out whether you want to use zigbee or zwave or something else. Is this the only automation you want to do or are you wanting to be able to grow into automating other stuff?
Does a pi4 do that much better with nvme over usb than a sata ssd over usb (what I use)? All my high performance storage is in x86 boxes now because I only have gigabit networking so the speed advantage of nvme is really useful for local storage.
Half of the useful stuff I do with my homelab is home automation/home services so I’d say it counts!
Man that elf company pulled off an incredible marketing coup.
Is that one of those ARM servers with like 64 cores?