I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of people setting up NASes didn't have a desktop to put drives into. Lots of people are only using laptops or phones nowadays

That's true. But those aren't the people thinking about setting up NASes. Or at least not in my tech support experience. Those people will just have giant fragile octopuses of external USB drives.

But it is a problem that most people don't have capable computers anymore. :\