* Quarter hotel pans (the stackable kind).
* Painter's tape and Sharpies.
* Zojirushi water boiler.
* Foot pedal sink.
Purchased this last month and really regret not buying it years earlier (we got the 5L CV-DCC50 model).
It's amazing how we never worry about boiling water anymore (apart from large pots of water for cooking pasta or something).
Our electric water kettle sees very little use now.
The basic setup has more or less stayed the same, but there's some more extra components around it you have to know now (spam filtering and SPF/DKIM/DMARC come readily to mind).
To quote Michael Lucas: "everything complicated about emails revolves around spam and not getting it". I highly recommend his book, "Run Your Own Mail Server".[1]
In short, hosting your own email is not that bad at all. I strongly suspect, like many other skills, since it has atrophied with the advent of the cloud and people readily giving up to the large carriers, it has gotten the reputation of being hard, or as you said, a full time job. I don't think either of those things are true.
[1] - https://mwl.link/run-your-own-mail-server.html