You can pry my gen8 hp microserver from my cold, dead hands.

If those are important to you yes but the old desktop route generally means you’ll get access to more powerful chips plus the ability to add more storage and memory.

An usually apt comparison to childbirth.

At a functional level I can’t see any reason why it wouldn’t work. Though my preffered method for that has always been old desktops over phones as it gives a lot more flexibility overall.

Generally speaking I find USB hubs with ports on them work pretty well with android as they’re just relying on the Linux kernel drivers for the USB support.