How close do you think this is? Deploys everything but the actual backend/frontend code.

Is more approachable than one might think, as you can currently find two of these for less than 1,000 USD.

I'd encourage you to generally ignore whether something has direct value or not because that's not how knowledge works. For example, I once spent well over a month implementing the NthWeekday function using nothing but basic arithmetic operations. This would allow us to calculate all federal holidays for a given year at runtime instead of precalculating the values and storing them in a table (which I hated, because it meant that someone had to maintain that table). This hyper-specific problem has near-zero direct value, but it was THE project that sparked my passion for maths.