It’s extremely common in Enterprise where costs for a 100k+ server isn’t the most expensive part of running, maintaining, servicing said server. If your home lab isn’t practicing 3-2-1 backups (at least three copies of your data, two local (on-site) but on different media/devices, and at least one copy off-site) yet, I’d spend money on that before ECC.
Maybe I’m misunderstanding the purpose or goal but wouldn’t this be perfect use case for a virtual machine? I’m surprised no one has suggested that. A one off temporary, easily reverted back to pristine with snapshots sounds like exactly what you would want for testing something like this out.