Re: $200-$400 isn't that cheap
A while back I bought a really cheap system similar to the one that is in the article. IIRC, it was £89 on offer on Amazon and produced by a company called Beelink.
I had no great expectation that this system could be used for any heavy duty applications like application development or running VMs. It really uses a low end laptop Celeron, a J3355 running at 2GHz with two cores, although it has SpeedStep technology (or whatever it is called now) so it is often running much slower than that. It uses the display adapter in the CPU, and is reported as an i915, so not that performant, but it's well supported by pretty much anything you run in it.
It came with Windows10 installed and activated on 64GB of eMMc memory, but I put in a 128GB M.2 SATA card (it had to be SATA, as I don't think it supports NVMe). I'm still using the 4GB of memory that it was delivered with, but it has a single SODIMM slot, although I don't know the maximum capacity. It has a Gigabit Ethernet and 8023ac Wifi. I think it has Bluetooth, but I have that turned off in the BIOS.
I was looking for a silent, small system that I could put a Linux distro on to act as an always on headless server in a corner of the house to drive an old, non-WiFi enabled printer, as well as anything else I thought of, but unfortunately it's not silent. It's quiet, but still noisy enough when busy to be noticeable.
I've ended up using it as a Devuan test system. It's currently running Daedalus installed without significant problems from the normal install media, and it does it quite well. It drives a single 1080p monitor reasonably smoothly. It runs and renders Youtube videos reasonably well at this resolution, although I have seen it stutter once or twice. Setting it up was a little awkward, as it would not identify Linux boot media until I turned the Secure Boot features off, and by default, when secure boot was off, it didn't actually want to see the eMMc memory as a location to install Linux to, but that's no big problem (there is a setting I discovered in uEFI/BIOS settings that did enable this to work, and it also affects the microSD card slot).
As a basic general purpose system for a non-technical person, I would say that it is capable of providing what is needed when running Linux. I could use it as a system bolted to the back of a telly with a wireless keyboard and mouse, to give a basic television access to some more services, but I could use a Raspberry PI for that more cheaply.
Windows was sluggish, and even though it has an activated licence, it has difficulty putting the latest Windows 10 update on (it comes up with a generic "Update failed" after spending nearly an hour downloading the update, and rebooting), not that this bothers me. I would not consider using this system for Windows. It's too slow, and can't take Windows 11 without hacks.
So it's a bit of an enigma. It's moderately capable when running Linux, though it would not really suit most people here. If all you wanted was a system to do some web browsing and play a few videos in the living room using the telly, then it may have a place. I just wish it was fanless. But there are better options around for a daily driver. I suspect that the slightly more expensive systems with better processor, if given enough RAM and a suitable SSD would be better, and almost certainly would run a Linux distro at least as well as my system.