We did do through hole plating in a home-like environment but yeah, it's a lot of work, experimenting, yield problems, etc. While possible, I realize it's not practical for most. (It's also a personality question how much time you are willing to spend in playing around, if you just want the results, it's not worth it. But if you enjoy the journey itself - then sure.)
We used the conductive ink from Think&Tinker Ltd., see
https://www.thinktink.com/stack/volumes/volvi/condink.htm for holewall activation, then electroplating in a DIY tank and a DC power supply. Yield was usually around 99% which is actually quite crap - with a board of say 200 holes, you'd typically have 1-2 of those that fail to conduct.
The reason to do the boards yourself is not cost savings, but very quick turn-around. It enabled innovative working patterns. Sometimes I got an idea, draw the layout in PCB CAD and make the PCBs, and 4-5 hours later I have a working prototype. Something with difficult IC packages or just tens and tens of tracks, so nearly impossible or just very cumbersome to prototype deadbug way (or breadboard).
One example would be an adapter board for a connecting several FPGA development boards together using wide parallel buses. Hundreds of pins and wires with 0.050" pitch connectors, would have taken full day soldering manually using wires. PCB done in less than 2 hours and connectors simply soldered in. It takes a few seconds to draw a track in PCB CAD, compare that to actually cutting, stripping, soldering a wire!