I vaguely remember reading a news story about a firefighter that did that a while ago.

Same here.

My 4 host machines run debian (proxmox). I have a lot of different guest flavors running though, debian, fedora, rocky, one old guest still running Ubuntu and even a mint sandbox machine.

I probably have a bit more complicated self host than others because I am using it both for my useful internal services (jellyfin, git, pihole, etc.) I also run a whole lot of services for learning, such as kubernetes and dns. Plus a whole lot of other mostly useless stuff that I only use to test different architectures or automations that come in handy as an SRE.