Minis are also common in homelabs. Small, cheap when used (even cheaper if it's your own old machine), and natively runs a Unix-like environment for each management and can easily boot into Linux instead. I suspect the switch to Apple silicon is going to change that, however.

I could see that switching to Intel Nuc and Intel Clear Linux instead.

That shift already seems to be happening. If you follow /r/homelab, plenty of people are building large homelabs using nothing but NUCs they paid $250 each. It's not uncommon to see racks with 4-8 of them networked together (you usually only see 1-2 Minis). There are also some AMD-based machines coming out that are that size, so there will be even more options available.