So its digging up dead children?🤔

I have replaced my amd phenom II X6, 12GB ram and 4 disk raid 10 and a crappy psu desktop, with a topton amd ryzen 5825U with 64 GB ram and 2 TB SSD.
I run proxmox with powertop optimized excluding the ethernet adapters.
This was really a big step forward in performance and because my workloads (nextcloud,homeassistant and vaultwarden) are mostly idle a lot of the time the processor cores can spend in sleep mode conserving power. To be honest i have not used an power measuring device, so my estimation is based on the powertop reported powerconsumption times 2. However in homeassistant the lowest power consumed in the night for my home dropped from 147 watts to about 85 watts.

Take also power consumption in consideration. I myself have run a homeserver based on an older amd processor and recently updated to a low power device. The old server had a standby powerusage of about 60-70 watt. The new one has a standby usage closer to 2,5 - 5 watts while having a lot more performance. Depending where you are on the world and the powercosts the powersavings you have offset the costs of new hardware within 1,5-2 years if the server runs 24/7.

When and if you need a homeserver realy depends on your specific needs. For me: I do not want to use cloud services as primary storage for my personal and family photos. I want to run homeautomation based on homeassistant and a password manager on my own server.
For you it might be different. Consider that network storage from a fileserver has typically a lower performance so using it for games and gamefiles might not work.

Also the type of fileserver to deploy (windows shares/samba vs nfs) depends on what os you run on your laptop. Typically i would assume you use windows and would a linux server running samba be most logical choice. Or a more preconfigured os like openmediavault which helps a lot with a more intuitive gui.

However if file sharing is the only usecase maybe a nas like a synology, qnap or asustor might be a easier system to setup. This also tackles the powerconsumption issue.