As someone with an n100, I did have to spend on an apple TV to have a hardware accelerated client for some of the harder to transcode content (h265 4k at higher bit rates). N100 will absolutely choke on some of those even with hardware acceleration enabled.
Just replying to agree to everything. You will also not believe just how fast home assistant feels running on an n100 compared to a RPI 4. Can’t speak of the RPI 5 wince I don’t have one, but unless you plan to interface with hardware, a used thin client mini PC just can’t be beat with the 5 being so expensive for this use case.
Not to mention some environments don’t let you install anything other than what’s already on the box. Both sh and bash generally are available.