Maybe, depends on what your priorities are! Personally I use ARM SBCs to get physically separate hosts for things like Consul/Vault/Nomad servers, k8s control

Maybe, depends on what your priorities are! Personally I use ARM SBCs to get physically separate hosts for things like Consul/Vault/Nomad servers, k8s control plane, some monitoring instances, workers for loads that don't need blazing single-thread performance, etc. This way I can run something close to "best practices" HA redundant clusters while staying low on purchase and electricity costs, and my whole setup can fit in a suitcase if I need to move. Some of the things you mention (m.2, RTC, switches) are things that are either included or cheap and easy add-ons to the boards I mentioned. Another nice upside is the low power means it's easier to power them via PoE, so you don't need a power supply in the first place. I also try to go as far as I can in the direction of libre/open software/firmware/hardware, which means I try to minimize the reliance on Intel and AMD CPUs.