I have Pi 5 and I wish I bought N100. It's unstable, loses internet connection after few days and I have to manually power cycle it. NVMe is patchy, I had to buy a few modules until I found one that is working, but I don't trust it.
Seems like RPi 5 was rushed to stay relevant, but it wasn't thought through.
There are lots of problems with the Pi 5 (the absurd power draw, the lack of eMMC, breaking 10 years of GPIO compatibility), but the PCIe connector is definitely not one of them. In fact it's probably the best thing about it by far because it sets up a new standard, and soon every random SBC will have the same PCIe out port so they can run all of these compatible boards. Some might even support more than one lane eventually.
My last Pi is 4 and Pi5 is just completely pointless to me.
edit: as mentioned below, make sure the machine you buy has a socketed WiFi module.
I agree that the RPi5 doesn't make much sense. NVMe needs to be built in at a minimum, and the specialized PSU requirement is a PITA.
Instead, I should wait a few months (or most of a year), triple my budget, and make room for a larger system.
Seems they aren't affiliated with Pine64 either...
https://geekworm.com/products/x1011
Four NVMe drives multiplexed onto a single PCIe lane? Sure, why not!
https://pineboards.io/products/hat-upcity-lite-for-raspberry...
The OP also has a board which breaks the lane out to a full size PCIe slot, so you can put a 4090 in there. You shouldn't, but you can.
We also once multiplexed everything on a single ISA or PCI bus.
It's not necessarily the most performant thing for parallel[ish] operations, but there's nothing broken about the idea. It works.
