Honestly, when I learned that rEFInd supports loading dxe modules natively I swapped and never looked back (NVMe boot drives on ancient computers, my beloved)
You can get an intel arc a310 for ~$90 and it has absolutely insane transcode performance, so depending on how large your library is it might even end up cheaper than buying more storage to just live-transcode everything.
an old LGA2011 xeon workstation. It is wild overkill (and not very power efficient) but it isn’t only a seedbox and it has as much PCIe expansion as I could ever want.