I use Homepage for something similar to this

Agreed. You’re at the mercy of your USB controllers as well as southbridge in that case.

You’re adding more things that can go wrong.

Generally HBA/RAID cards are usually built for enterprise rather than consumer so they’re usually more reliable as well.

If this is black magic, will I be subject to some sort of witch trial in the near future?

I did this today. Was trying to get a searxng instance running on oracle cloud’s free tier, but it’s so doggedly slow between OS, docker, searxng, that it’s useless and locks up all the time.

And their free ARM option never has availability so I just deleted the instance and started a new one with great speed to burn through my free credits.