ok, to start with, if you need a POSIX interface to the filesystem, you already have an SSH connection to that server, and don't need much stability across multiple clients, SSHFS may do just fine. For a homelab, that is likely the case.

now, if you're hosting a web server that needs data distributed across drives/nodes, data redundancy, and the usage is primarily programmatic, closer to a CDN's or machine learning pipeline than a single user browsing files; then you want an S3-compatible solution. The S3 API makes it easier to plug it into your application, while allowing you to migrate to a different one - which I'm actually currently doing for a MinIO deployment at work.