NUCs are underrated IMHO. I picked up a NUC7 mid-2020, mounts on a VESA plate behind my monitor, used for media, fileshare, general Linux tinkering and VMs. Zero problems (except for a secondary disk failure last year, spinning rust type).

Nice to see Asus have finally started doing something with them.

I see there's lots of competition (or at least, lots of options) in that space now.