What about a 4000 series or even a 3000 series with similar performance but older features? Looks like you could save 2-300$ going that way.

You must have a lot of people and/or some heavy mods. I haven’t had much issues with 3-4 people on a VM with a Xeon E5-2690 2.90GHz

In all my research most cases for standard hardware are 4u and when you try to get down to 1u or 2u you spend a lot of time/money trying to fit it. I would look into buying dedicated server like a dell r6xx series box and going from there you’d honestly save money and headache.

No blades are different they are small full compute modules that go into a large backplane chassis https://www.supermicro.com/sites/default/files/2018-11/8U_SuperBlade.png

There are builds for Android TV lineage os for the raspberry pi. If you are willing to put in some work for alternative apps it’s a great interface with no Google integration. I’ve used kodi before i moved to jellyfin always found the kodi -> jellyfin integration to be clunky. Google TV would be much cleaner

Have you thought about log aggregation with something like Prometheus/graphana or ELK?

Lol thinking about cpu notifications for myself. I get notified when the fans ramp up on my server.