The Mk4 made up a lot of ground, but I agree they are a pricey option. Personally I was able to justify the price by the benefits of open source, if the company disappears tomorrow I’m confident the open source community could continue issuing firmware/slicer updates.
I’m basically running this setup with Unraid as my hypervisor. It’s definitely doable, but takes a lot of tinkering to get everything up and running and games with super strict anti cheat won’t run at all. I would only recommend going this route if you really enjoy tinkering, I’d say finding a cheap second hand PC for your NAS is probably much less work.