I use oracle vm. It has enough free bandwidth for my needs.
With plex you wont need any thing. Just machine capable of transcoding like anything above intel 10th gen would be fine. Or gpu. For direct play to mutiple devices tailscale is fine.
The capacitors they use are same as used by cheaper products. Go watch any teardown and search the company. For example one of the company is AiSHi which is chinese and you can look up from there.
Yeah thats the joke.
256gb wont be enough if you work on multiple projects or even monorepos. Apart from that it should be ok.
Would suggest op to get M4 as it is considerably better than 1&2. If they get good deal on m3 16gb then that is fine as well.