What Intel said is that they will not launch any new models, so the future NUC with a Meteor Lake CPU must have been canceled, or perhaps sold to a partner like ASRock.
The best alternatives are from ASUS, Beelink and Minisforum.
Alternatives with lower performance, but perhaps also lower prices, are from Gigabyte, Zotac, ASRock and ASRock Industrial, and from a lot of smaller Chinese companies, which are the cheapest, but which also have more variable quality.
If your target had been an i7 Raptor Lake, then at the same price you could have bought a SFF with a much faster AMD Phoenix CPU (Ryzen 7 7840U, Ryzen 7 7840HS or Ryzen 9 7940HS).
Because you want a medium performance medium price computer, you can find at a lower price than a Raptor Lake i5, i.e. under $500, SFF computers with the Ryzen 7 7735HS CPU (Zen 3+), which are faster and which also have a much faster GPU.