I mean, for 10 bucks anything is a decent deal. Those specs are pretty decent for a simple home server. I'm not familiar with HP thin clients, but I assume you can install a Disdro of your choice on it? My big reason to avoid HP is their crap software and warranties, both of which are moot here.
I would say relatively light software like tailscale, pihole and such would be fine. Docker containers might be pushing it, but that depends largely on what containers you want to run, same goes for nginx; by itself the requirements are fairly low, it depends on what you want to run on it.
Jellyfin might be a stretch, and as you alluded to, real-time transcoding is probably out. It strongly depends on the decoding capabilities of that chip and wether it does hardware decoding or if it all happens in software. The latter might be too much for it. If it can handle it though, it might be interesting as a media player hooked up to a TV, rather than acting as a transcoding or DLNA-esque server.
I read a bit of fan fiction ages ago that extrapolated on what would have happened if Anakin had, at the pivotal confrontation with Mace and Palpatine, made the choice to support Mace instead.
I liked the interpretation that it would have still resulted in Luke and Leia, since Padma would still have had the twins, but not in secret, and without force fuckery, would've survived childbirth.
In this timeline, it results in a new high republic era, Anakin as a master, raising his children and them being his anchor to the light side. The friction in the story came from the politics of the Council disapproving of his attachment to his family, but it is also politically difficult to kick out the person who just saved their hides.
While the story didn't touch upon Ahsoka's fate much, I would have loved to see a timeline where Ahsoka raised a family and her kids hanging out with the Skywalker's.
That alone has so much potential for storylines; there would still be remnant forces of separatists, rogue troopers, the death star plans being out there, and potentially Maul as well.