Dedicated wifi for automation allows me to have devices such as Xiaomi Vaccuum, or security camera not phoning home. OpenWRT with good firewall rules completely isolate my "public" containers/VMs from my lan.
Server was built over time, disk by disk. I'm now aiming to buy only 12TB drives, but I got to sacrifice the first two as parity...
I just love the simplicity of snapraid / mergerfs. Even if I were to loose 3 disks (my setup allows me the loss of 2 disks), I'd only loose data that's on these disks, not the whole array. I lost one drive once, recovery went well and was relatively easy.
I try to keep things separated and I may be running a bit too many containers/vms, but well, I got resources to spare :)
Without talking about the resources it would require, youtube could totally only serve the ad until it has been "watched". And no amount of sponsor block or similar software would help. These software only work because youtube allow you to navigate the video. If they decide that you have to fully download a 30s ad video, and that you can't ask for the video for the first 30s, then you wouldn't be able to do anything (or at the very max, just hide the ad and wait 30s on a blank screen).