Which Modern NAS?

yea so many options it is truly analysis paralysis at this point.  NAS tech has come a very long way since the readynas days.  These days you can get a few very powerful NAS devices with 4-6 bays...and they can run windows11, truenas, unraid or whatever you want, handle ECC, handle hypervisors, have 2-4 M.2 slots also for running the OS, cacheing or more storage, and sometimes even have PCI expansion slots...also with 10gbit ethernet and on and on.  the best ones are getting up to $1500 I guess, which is kind of a lot, but that would be basically the same as a DIY build except they have sorted out form factor and usually include hot swapping and stuff like that.  It turns out that most of the less expensive NAS these days do not support ECC.  many opinions about ECC or not, but I am currently of the opinion that I want ECC.  So that kind of rules out most lower priced NAS options anyway.  The CPU and motherboard have to support ECC and generally that results in a $1k+ DIY build or one of the higher end NAS units will also be in that price range, I reckon the price difference is not that great between DIY and one of the higher end NAS as soon as you add ECC as a requirement.  A DIY would have more PCI slots perhaps, or some other little advantage.  Some of the best NAS candidates I have seen as of now that provide nearly the same flexibility as DIY but in a prebuilt form factor are:

Minisform N5Pro 

Aoostar WTR Max

Synology does have some consumer priced NAS with ECC, but they are generally limited in other ways, running ARM and may or may not work for plex and definitely would not be enough if you want to somehow use the NAS as a homelab server, running windows VM's or whatever.  I don't have a great need for some of that advanced stuff, but this time around I mainly want to make sure that I will not be stuck if the company decides to stop updating the OS for the unit or something like that, like what happened with the readynas.  I don't trust synology, I think they will deprecate their units over time.  The advantage of either DIY, or one of the NAS that can run any OS, is that in the future I will not be tied to the manufacturer, I should be able to update the OS to linux or truenas or windowsXX or any number of different things, unlike my experience with Readynas which has dead-ended.  I feel my 524x is perfectly usable hardware even today, it's sad to me that its dead ended the way it is and not worth the trouble to try to keep it going.

So anyway for me it seems like I am torn in that I want ECC and its generally like twice the price get a NAS with ECC support, due to CPU and motherboard requirements; that also happens be in the 4-6 bay size range.  $700 is a more acceptable amount to pay for what I need to do, but most of them today don't support ECC.