Yes. You might have difficulty with some devices, such as robot vaccuums, but with some research it's very doable. Personally I like Tasmota as it allows me to build my own devices or buy other products and then flash Tasmota on it.
https://templates.blakadder.com/preflashed.html
Home Assistant is also very much recommended.
The amount of times I've completely rebuilt my home setups is... many. But to get where I am now, I would never have been able to plan it properly without the learning experience of "failing" so many times. And there will always be a better way to do it as things need upgrading so in a way it is perpetual. Start with the projects you want first. Get them working and make sure you can export the data properly before you begin to rely on them. Then once you have small bits done, add extras, like cloudflare, vpn, portainer, proxmox. There will be a lot of formatting and reinstalling and going back to the drawing board, just accept it as a learning experience but take each piece once by one. If there is a specifc
yet I can barely find info on HOW to set up this things.
There are plenty of guides out there that makes assumptions that you should already know things, which can be frustrating, I found this especially true with docker related documentation. If you find yourself on a github page, check the Releases tab. If it's still confusing there, check for a docker folder in the github and search "docker ". Start with popular more documented projects that will usually include beginner instructions that less popular software will omit. Even then if you keep looking you can usually fine one good doc that clears things up.
Also, in this realm, chat GTP excels at obscure configurations so it's worth giving it a shot when stuck.
Being a bit of a rebel myself. I use ONLY a tld, and where subdomains would be used, I use domain.tld
This has lead me to discover quite a few projects out there that don't parse domain names correctly, especially when you want to use an email like admin@tld and it cries because you have no dot.