How to create custom panel home page?

Alright, I think I found the least-painful approach for this. Rather than extending the site view, simply create a custom section or field and load that via site.yml.

In /customHomeView/index.js

window.panel.plugin('namespace/customHomeView', {
   sections: {
      customHomeView: {
         template: /*html*/ `
            <h2>Testing...</h2>
         `,
      },
   },
})

In site.yml

sections:
  main:
    type: customHomeView