I’ve had a good experience so far with two minipcs, mele quieter 4c for kodi, and a morefine m9 (I think this one is branded as mipowcat in the EU). They’re both n100, the m9 can go up to 32gb of ram although it is picky about what modules it will accept. I use the m9 for jellyfin and about 10 other services. Quick sync works great as far as I’ve tested it. For jellyfin I’m relying mostly on direct streaming, but I tried a few episodes with forcing some transcoding by using Firefox for playback and it worked fine.
Sounds like you don’t smoke cigarettes, so not that dumb!