Same story. I looked at a NUC as a possible SFF PC, balked at the price, and ended up buying a Lenovo M93p Tiny off a guy on Craigslist for a lot less.
I fell in love with Lenovo and HP SFF/'tiny pcs' a couple years ago. It can be tricky to find ample display outs in a preferred hardware configuration but otherwise they've been cheap, quiet, reliable and efficient. I realized as much as I like the tech and even idea of gaming, I don't game much anymore at all so without the need for a proper GPU these things have really simplified computing in my life to the point I have very capable extra hardware for projects and experiments ready to just plug in and go.
10/10 will buy more again
I run mine headless. It's a great little x86 box for Jellyfin/home automation/logging/anything I want to run inside my local network that doesn't need graphics and won't accidentally get turned off.
Same here, I wanted to have a mini desktop to transplant the hard drive of a dying laptop, so I was looking into them, and exactly because of that I gave up.
...but in practice I never got one, because they were always so expensive. The same hardware can be found in a laptop for much less.