I used an older Chromebox as my desktop. If you get the decent ones, it's an Intel laptop cpu with decent (but not heroic) cooling and performs as you would expect from that. I don't think you get any controls for ram timings or voltage control, and generally the storage slots are very short, so you have limited options. It's great as a low cost, no bs, small form factor platform, but if you want performance and can go bigger, desktop chips will run laps around it.
For network routing, I don't think I've seen a chromebox with two nics, so you need to be OK with USB networking or single nic routing (which can still be useful depending on the details).
Video conferencing isn't that hard these days, the iGPU handles video encode/decode and you're done.