Will this be overkill or otherwise not recommended for someone who is new and just starting to learn?
My goal is to have something I can grow into, but initially I'd like to host a few VMs, game servers, and a have place to store content. I'd also like to host a PLEX server in the future as well but might buy a separate piece of hardware for it specifically down the road. Thanks in advance for taking the time to help a newbie!
All depends on what you're looking to host. For some perspective I run a valheim server, home assistant, jellyfin media server and a handful of other applications on a 2011 mac mini i7 8 core cpu with 2 ssds using sofware raid 1 on debian. I had the ssd's lying around and picked up the mac mini from a job site recycling a bunch of equipment but it's quiet efficient for my use case. I have an old 2 bay qnap connected to that "server" using NFS so that adds 6TB for my Jellyfin server to store media on.