If you go back a few generations, the C246 chipset can be had on boards costing 200, and if you pair it with an i3-9100T you get ECC as well as pretty damn low power usage.
That's true, but if your goal is low power, that's not necessarily going to be a bottleneck - even if you dedicate all 16 PCIe lanes to NVMe storage it's going to be more than fast enough for 99% of home server needs.