There are plenty of NAS boxes out there with better specs, lower power consumption, faster networking, and half the price.
Synology has marketed their NAS boxes as “application servers”, replacing Google Drive/Dropbox/Whatever, as well as various photo management solutions, office suite, instant messaging, mail server, virtual machine host, docker host, and much more.
In theory they’re able to do all that, but out of the box they’re barely able to run Synology Drive (Google Drive replacement) and Synology Photos at the same time, and requires a RAM upgrade to perform.
Even with upgraded RAM, you’re still looking at a low powered processor that’s a decade old. Yes, it will run home assistant and Pihole / Adguard home just fine, and probably also Vaultwarden and others. It also runs the entire *arr stack with Plex/Emby/Jellyfin on top (though they’ve removed transcoding and hardware acceleration despite the CPU being capable).
And I guess that keeps a lot of users happy. It does “what they want” in a fire & forget solution. Set it up, toss it in a closet, and stop worrying.
If only their apps weren’t half baked. Photos runs well, rarely stops working, but doesn’t backup photos as much as it intends to replace whatever photo management solution you’re using today. Sadly their solution doesn’t backup originals but only edited versions, and their own software doesn’t support editing. Their “AI” features are extremely limited (probably due to lack of CPU/GPU).
Drive works, but it’s oh so slow. I can synchronize my entire iCloud contents locally faster than Synology Drive can upload it over LAN.
The list goes on. Their apps do the absolute minimum needed to be usable, and once they’ve reached that stage they rarely update them except to fix bugs.
It's a NAS. It just needs to be reliable.