i don't know if i really like that definition. Going by the definition of a laboratory, it doesn't really make much sense. I mean sure they're a sterile environment, but it's incredibly unlikely that a lab is wiped clean and built from scratch, unless you get millions of dollars, and a lot of free time, i guess.

A lab is merely a place to do work with regard to studying, learning, or improving something.

People often refer to their "homelab" as an entire server rack, you want me to believe that people are willing to wheel out their entire server rack and discard the entire fucking thing? I doubt it. A homelab is just a collection of gear, (usually commercial networking gear) intended for providing an environment for you to mess around with things and learn about stuff.

In some capacity a homelab has to be semi permanent, if not for anything other than actually testing reliability and functionality of services and hardware, for the actual services themselves, because a part of the lab, is the service itself.