Well worth it. Barebones kit (bring your own SSD + RAM) is around $250 brand new. Sure you could grab cheaper deals off eBay too. You get much better build quality than the NUC and a Ryzen which kicks the shit out of Intel these days.

Got my node running on one plus a Tor Nostr relay, Nextcloud, Robosats and a few other little things. Doesn't break a sweat.