There are other SFF PCs available which were more competitively priced than NUCs to start with: Minisforum and Geekom are two popular brands I've used. There are also various SFF desktop PCs from major manufacturers like HP EliteDesk Mini which can be found dirt cheap at corporate auctions.
I have an Intel 11th-gen/Tiger Lake Geekom IT11 running as my "home server" with Frigate, HomeAssistant, and so on. It works great, and using OpenVINO for object detection inference and QuickSync for video leaves a ton of headroom for other uses too. The only disadvantage to these, which was shared by NUCs, is that you need to use Thunderbolt for >Gbit Ethernet connectivity.
I have an Intel 11th-gen/Tiger Lake Geekom IT11 running as my "home server" with Frigate, HomeAssistant, and so on. It works great, and using OpenVINO for object detection inference and QuickSync for video leaves a ton of headroom for other uses too. The only disadvantage to these, which was shared by NUCs, is that you need to use Thunderbolt for >Gbit Ethernet connectivity.