I did support for inexpensive, but commercial grade network equipment. I'd just been promoted to a senior support engineer 2 days earlier. My boss came to me and said "we have a customer who just deployed a over $250k of equipment and it doesn't work. The customer, sales person and account rep are on the call, we need you to figure it out". After an hour or so going over their setup we found out our new switch connects to a 3com switch over a fiber line. 3com was out of business at this point, but I managed to find documentation on the product online. It's fiber ports were FDDI. Our switch only supported Ethernet (No one really supported FDDI at this time.) At which point the sales person said "we'll just have to replace the rest of the hardware" and the customer agreed.
A few times a year. Usually in the summer when I'm outside grilling. Drank a fair amount in my 20s. Then I had kids. I didn't want to be hungover and having to deal with kids. Also didn't have time to drink after kids.
Hardest part was mounting everything in my 1U chassis. Using an ATX power supply with the break out board solved a lot of problems. That way the SBC gets 12v, and the sata drives get power at the same time. And you've got connectors for fans and stuff. You can use a smaller form factor PSU. I think mine is like 200W but that's more than enough to power the board, expansion card, fans, and drives.
On the software side, I just use the Debian based distro "Armbian". But it looks like you can use others.
https://www.pine64.org/rockpro64/
If I remember I'll post the pcie card with 4x sata I use.