About half a year ago I was looking into this as well.
After much discussion and research and advice from s friend I got this https://protectli.com/product/fw6c/
(But a cheap AliExpress one)
Anyway I wanted: 1. multiple VMs (got about 10 running at the moment, hassio, pfsense, 2 pihole, freenas, Plex, webserver, etc) and the thing is running at 20%cpu, but powerful enough to use it all when it needs to. 2. Cheap to run. It's only 35w tdp, having a full fledged server is power hungry 3. Silent. No fans, servers can be loud. 4. Upgradable. I recently installed 1tb SSD, and upped the ran to 32gb. 5. Multiple NICs for pfsense.
For me it's a great learning tool. And plenty powerful for my needs.
I might change it to run pfsense only, and get a asrock 300 or so to replace it VM s. But so far I'm happy.