But fair enough, let's assume 45W and not 95W. It's still a lot more than the Mac Mini.
Yes, for the first time in eternity apple has an edge in hardware. The solution is obviously to go all in in their walled garden ... profit?
You pick software ecosystem first, then you pick the hardware to run it. As such NUC vs. Mac Mini is apples vs. oranges.
The typical solution, if VMs are your use case, is to use a hypervisor, such as XCP-NG, proxmox, ESXi etc. But if you want to shoehorn in OS X just for the sake of it, sure, that will work. But I guess you'd have to be pretty deep into apples ecosystem to even consider that.
And with VMs you typically want RAM and disk-space, and if you pick such a closed ecosystem that is going to be a real bummer.
But that’s a good point. I would say that we are in the DIY infrastructure world as deploying VMs on a Mac mini or NUC isn’t really following the industry best practices, but installing proxmox on a amd64 box is probably easier.
Designing the cooling system to keep up with that is by definition overkill. Which might be fine! Overkill can be fun. But it kind of goes in the face with a small system like a NUC.