LOL. Priceless. Having these skills is very valuable. Us old farts used to do a lot with what today would be called "bootstrapped". Scarcity is no longer a "problem", except that it is. Scarcity keeps you sharp, efficient, on the edge - where you need to be. It's also - cheaper.
Tbf iscsi and especially it’s future demise - nvmeof can be made quite fast. The problem that in gp2/3, gce-pd cases it’s probably not some native storage but another layer of software-based distributed store which makes stuff slow/expensive