Perhaps they're not cheaper.

I bet they will in due time. They have to recompile their whole stack to ARM, which probably isn't easy, but ARM is eating the world. It's only a matter of time.

That's what they said about Itanium too. /s

I think that's clearly not an apt analogy.

The 80-core ARM servers Hetzner provides are great. A nice midpoint between a slower general-purpose x86_64 server and an expensive and brittle GPU server.

I can easily see datacenters with these things in the future.

Probably a question of performance. NAS and IoT appliances have performance requirements too.

Majority of consumer nases are running the cheapest oldest arm and mips cpus they can find.

Low-end NASes have been using ARM for a long time.

The higher end x86 NASes are advertised closer to "home datacentre in a box" solutions that offer VM/container runtimes and third party software markets.

So far, x86 is significantly more user friendly and performant for these use cases: the "desktop-ish performance for desktop-ish prices" range doesn't really have many hardware options (Apple certainly won't sell theirs to OEMs, and the Snapdragon 8c is a bit on the low end, and the real data centre ARM many-core monsters are too big); and the software offerings aren't quite as user friendly either.