To be fair it's not like you can run one from your home connection. I mean you could, but it wouldn't be a good idea, unfortunately.

Running an exit relay from home would be a very bad idea, and if your IP frequently changes you might not be picked as guard relay. But I don't see why you couldn't run a middle relay from home, as long as you don't have a traffic cap.

You can run an exit relay from home, at least in the US. There are some ISPs (mostly on the East coast, afaict) that may not help you, but most of them seem to understand how the laws work.

In other countries you may not have such luck.

Running an intermediate/middle node is generally safe. You want to avoid running an exit node.

Running a middle node got my IP banned from some services, even services provided by my ISP.

Indeed, some CDNs like Akamai do not bother distinguishing relays from exit nodes and just ban everything.

Does this apply to snowflake relays?

The whole point of Snowflake relays is that nobody knows about them. If Akamai knows about it, then it failed.

I've never heard of snowflake relays. What are they?

A new tool from Tor:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29634636

I've been running a Tor relay from my home for a decade, at least. It's not an exit relay. Never had any issue.