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Maybe not as ideal as you want, but I typically just stick in a USB drive.

It's not like the OS drive needs the performance when the vast majority of your data is written to ZFS.

You should be able to stick an M.2 adapter card in the PCIe riser

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B07SQZBSCN

Not if you need to use the PCIe for adding any kind of decent networking though. :(

Still, USB 3.2 probably means some kind of decently reliable USB stick would probably work instead.

Linux will get that, but will the firmware? If not you still need a SATA or USB DOM to put your /boot on. Annoying.

Unless you stick Clover EFI bootloader on a USB/SD card to allow booting from the SSD.

I have an older Microserver (not sure which one), it had spare SATA ports and I put an SSD in one of them, slotted it in some free space and now have RAIDZ on all four disks.

Would be even better if they had the option of 8x 2.5" slots and NBase-T or 10Gbps Ethernet. The old Gen 10 was way too large, this one I could replace my Synology with it running FreeNAS.

If you use FreeNAS, you can simply load it into memory from a small usb stick and use the SATA drives for that stripped mirror.

like the faster-than-sata usb-ports?