AM4 can do 128 GB with 4 32 GB sticks.

Other than that I agree with your post. No way you get more for your money as soon as you start going beyond the base configuration which is still 8 GB RAM /256 GB SSD in 2023/24 by the way.

Sure, it’s a compact and very power efficient device and having 10 GbE built-in for a reasonable price uplift (decent PCIe 10 GbE cards aren’t much cheaper) is great. But to be honest an Intel NUC or even desktop parts with low-end motherboards aren’t exactly power suckers when mostly idle.

And then SSD storage and RAM pricing is like a quarter compared to what Apple charges for it, if even that. And you have the choice of going for ECC RAM on supported platforms, which is great for a file server for example.

OS compatibility is a big one as well, you can basically choose between macOS and Asahi Linux and while the latter is probably okay for self-hosting purposes, I prefer more stable and long-supported distros like Debian.