Definitely agree. If you need to spin up a bunch of discrete VMs for labbing, that's one thing, but noise, cooling, power consumption, and space all come into play for dedicated hardware. I host a variety of services and they all run on small, low energy hardware (which is often pretty cheap). I just spun up a matrix server on a $100 ebay HP ProDesk which has plenty of power (probably enough to deploy my whole stack).
I've always felt that Arch has the least amount of personal compromises. For "bleeding edge," it's also generally stable and has a wealth of community support and documentation.