I just want to say that I don’t love the NUC for homelabs; mainly that it only has one NIC. I also don’t like USB NICs because I’ve had too many problems with them dropping out without any obvious cause, and then working again by simply unplugging them and plugging them back in. I don’t like to have to be that hands-on with my lab, I just want it to work.
If you’re okay with the limits of a single NIC, then the NUC is a great option; for my homelab, I actually run a storage network, so I generally need two NICs; one for production/front-end traffic, and one for storage/back-end traffic.
Beyond that gripe, you could do a lot worse than a NUC for your homelab. You may be able to save some money if you get an off-lease Core i5/i7 business class system, and the mini/micro systems that are available are quite good, even in the used market. If you want new, I’d probably say the NUC is going to be one of the cheaper options, even considering the tiny/mini/micro systems that are out there. I’ve used several tiny/mini/micro for small processing systems; one example of this is a DNS server; in another case, I used one for HomeAssistant. Neither system relies on external storage (no storage network requirement), so they performed quite well.
I know most people don’t run a storage network, and just use containers/VMs on local storage, so if that’s you, or you’re just starting out, any tiny/mini/micro or NUC will do quite well.