Having used HAProxy for 15 years commercially, I absolutely agree with this. There are lots of complex features of HAProxy that only a dedicated proxy can provide. The acls, deep packet inspection and stick tables are a few.

Whilst it doesn’t directly “serve” PHP or Python - it’s a load balancer so can just have regular Apache or nginx backends serving content which is arguably its main use case. For homelab this doesn’t always make sense but I would pick nginx for high traffic commercial environments.

I have my HA setup with a trunk and a sub-interface in each VLAN for auto discovery. The IOT sub-interface then doesn’t require a gateway and the two networks can then be kept Isolated.

I was always (apparently wrongly) under the impression that if someone touched a car, that it could not continue to race. I assume this must just be for marshals, but could be extended to pit crew.

Check the /etc/exports on the host. Is the .116 device listed there?