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Yeah, I went with mini PCs myself. Have a Lenovo M720 Tiny and a Dell Optiplex 3080 Micro (they are virtually almost the same). You can change parts, there are ample ports available and you can pretty much run any OS you want. In the Dell you can even put 3 storage drives (1x 2.5" and 2x M2) so perfect for an SSD NAS.

The sensible thing is to separate NAS from transcoding. Use NAS only for storage, and solve your computational needs with a mini PC or even just a RasPi.

Pretty sure the Intel NUCS(now manufactured by ASUS)/other mini PCs with Intel chips can do 4k transcodes easy.

This. My 4K 10-bit HDR viewing is served from a Intel Celeron N4505 dual-core processor (2.0 GHz/2.9 GHz) + integrated GPU that is running TrueNAS and a bunch of other services + Jellyfin for the actual media.

Works perfectly fine.

Buy a Mac Mini (older generations work well) for the actual transcoding, and use NAS as a, well, NAS.

NAS's aren't expensive, 4K@10bit is.