I can totally agree. From my personel experience these machines work just fine for a regular family household (so like 4 users). Only downside is if you need a lot of storage. But for that it is (imho) a better idea to have a dedicated machine.
From my personal experience I can totally agree. I have a HP Elitedesk with a i5-8500T and it runs multiple Jellyfin 4K HDR streams just fine with Hardware transcoding. And it does this while hosting other services like pihole, minecraft server, homeassistant in parallel. So for a regular family household these machines are good enough. Don’t know if it also works fine with more users (5+).
Just wanted to say thank you for the information that this is based on Wifi Aware and the proprietary AirDrop protocol from Apple. Helps understanding why there are some limitations.