[globular-toast]

Something like Talos gets you pretty close to cattle. You just boot a fresh VM from a generic ISO, then run a pre-defined config against it and it will join the cluster. I haven't looked into it but in theory you could pre-bake that config into the boot ISO so adding a new node would literally be just add a new VM using a template. Of course you'd want to remove the node from the cluster cleanly before just deleting it, though.

[alias_neo]

I run a couple of Talos clusters on Proxmox at home; I haven't templated them yet as they're pretty static clusters, but I suppose you could use a Proxmox Snippet with the config in and point new Talos nodes at it when they boot.

I've also been using a Terraform module for Proxmox at work to deploy stuff, but there's only two, both community modules and neither is gold/platinum tier, good enough for homelab though I'd say.