10-15 years ago the deals were real. I picked up a lot of off-lease and/or used stuff on ebay really cheap. As more and more companies move to cloud, and as more people get into homelabs, prices on decent gear have gone up. I was starting to think the good times were over in 2018 and in 2020 I stopped defaulting to ebay when I saw a great lot getting broken up and sold cheap suddenly pull all their stuff and relist it at much higher prices - "the scrappers are on to us" is what I realized.

These days I've been replacing the guts of my old servers with mini-itx setups for the most part. It does what I need and lets me shove 2 or 3 nodes into a 2u case so I can keep the aesthetic of "a personal rack".