None of them are first-time PC builders tho, so it might have something to do with lockdown-induced boredom, and my friends deciding to challenge themselves to build a SFPC. As it sounds like a major pain and challenge compared to even a mid-tower (according to those of them who have already finished).

I've seen a number of people who have built tiny custom cases, and the challenge of both building something like that and getting everything to fit in it is super enticing. Definitely seems like the challenge and cool factor of fitting tons of power into something tiny is making a lot of people consider such builds over traditional mid or full tower machines.

New desktop Intel 10th Gen CPU are actually coming out pretty soon. It's got a new socket (LGA 1200), so new motherboards are coming out for it as well.

It's only marginally faster on single thread benchmarks than the Ryzen 3000s (ie Zen 2) chips, and consumes a lot energy.

Also, Intel is still using their circa-2104/ancient 14 nm process for these desktop 10th Gen chips, which is quite disappointing. No Ice Lake 10 nm desktop chips yet.

Both of which are heavily impacted by single-thread performance. So getting a high single-thread perf CPIU would be a good thing to do.