You can run several low power systems with lots of capabilities for less total power than one general purpose system. Now- at some point there are applications the low power systems are either annoyingly sluggish at, or altogether incapable of, but if you’re not getting into that kind of stuff, then a handful of small systems can be the ticket.

I built a wooden box with a filter and a big (200mm) fan and put 4 raspberry pis + a network switch in the filtered airflow, the pi that serves stream analysis on frigate has a co-processing hat, the rest lighter weight stuff like homeassistant, libre elec, and so on. Definitely more work to setup than a single Intel Core NUC - but also about the same or lower power under load, has been rock solid for years, and the filtered air setup has kept dust out much better than my series of dust strangled NUCs over the years have.