I have a PiKVM attached to my PC at home, so at some point I'm thinking of setting up a crazy demand-scaling scheme where when my underpowered homelab nodes can power up the PC when they need to run a heavy workload.
WoL is easier if it works. My experience has been that with consumer hardware it usually doesn't. Debugging it is more hassle than it's worth IMO. I think if you don't have a proper mobo with a BMC then just throwing in a KVM is easier on average.
WoL is reliable when waking from sleep/suspend. I have yet to see consumer HW that can do it from poweroff. But if suspend is fine, all you have to do is configure your firmware to turn on after power loss (so you always boot into your OS) and in your OS enable WoL and configure suspend on inactivity as you wish. It should be reliable and failures would default to "on", not off.
