The cool thing is that it's very easy to migrate it to better hardware. HA backup and restore system is highly reliable. For this reason I can definitely recommend an RPi to start with, and who knows perhaps it will be enough forever, but if not then moving is a matter of ~one evening.
Funny that I should run into this now... Just this past weekend I tried the Home Assistant backup/restore mechanism for the first time, and it failed miserably for me :-(.
First it took over an hour to create the backup, then I got a 4.42 GiB tar file, that of course failed to upload to the new Home Assistant install.
I investigated and found that the tarball was just a compressed copy of the complete installation directory of my Home Assistant setup, and that included multi gigabyte `.cache/pip` and `.cache/uv` directories :-s (my old Home Assistant install operates from a Python virtual environment that I created, and Home Assistant keeps nagging me that this installation method is deprecated, so I decided to migrate to HAOS in a VM).
When I deleted those directories the tarball was less than 200 MiB but the new HAOS VM still would not accept the upload. All I got was "500 Internal Server Error - Server got itself in trouble". And of course because HAOS is an "appliance" its kind of a black box so I couldn't find out how to get access to error logs with details :-(.
In the end I decided that the path of least resistance was to simply start from scratch based on the HAOS virtual machine and take some days/weeks to build up the new Home Assistant setup before it's mature enough to take over from the old Home Assistant setup (which is running on hardware that is close to failure).
