Also, while I know this is a personal values judgement, Intel does a pretty good job with the NUCs (at least the mainstream 4x4 line) and given the SFF form factor involved, there is value in being the "mainstream product".
Things like good power management are not a given on competing products, I routinely see the "clones" coming in with 5-10w higher idle power (which is like, double) than the first-party product (most recently Atlas Canyon vs the third-party Tremont clones). Intel is selling to big corporate customers who care a lot about wasting 5W here and 10W there and they took the time to squeeze that.
Also (and this is a more general problem) Intel actually took the time to make the wireless work properly. I've had good bluetooth on exactly three products: intel macbooks, apple silicon macbooks, and intel NUCs. This cuts across cheap/premium, even my Dell Latitude coffee lake laptop from my last job had problems - the keyboard would disconnect, or get stuck repeating a key over and over again. Part of it is that the Intel Wireless chipsets are notoriously bad... but Intel and Apple seem to be able to make them work, so.. To be clear I did have some occasional issues on my NUC but it was way way better than the laptop or any other machine I've ever used (including motherboard wifi with external antenna placed close, dongles on usb 2.0, dongles placed close, etc). On a USFF machine like a NUC that's kind of an important thing, the odds of users using wifi or bluetooth is much higher and it needs to be reliable.
Finally, if you are ever planning to do anything custom/fancy it's potentially nice to have the standardized product. You can get things like plug an OpenUPS directly into the aux power header on the NUC (and again, Intel deserves credit for taking the time to consistently implement these things!) or put it in a HDPlex or Akasa chassis for fanless operation or upgrading it with a pcie card (which runs off the m.2 slot). There's just a ton more of those options available if you're the industry standard.
It sucks, I really want to like the AMD stuff, and maybe it'd be fine just as a desktop replacement. But Intel is one of those cases where it's potentially worth it to spend slightly more for a slightly worse product and just accept that there is an unknown (but probably nonzero) amount of time and effort being saved for that expense, because you're buying a standard, fully-baked product.
