Now I see I come across as snarky, it's the work burnout. I am damn near close break down, I need rest. I guess I get annoyed by argument "I have this important friend...".
In our studio, it was network bottlenecking everything, esp. because our work load is so small in terms of images done we do 70perc. distributed rendering and only 30perc. one image per node method.
And recently, I almost reported it as issue because DR froze my workstation, until I realized my traffic came to absolute halt because those 10 Megapixels I used to transfer just fine became absurdly big files with 12+ LightSelect passes and denoise information (the CRX was like 10GB being sent from 4 nodes).
So for me, to make even 10gbit network crawl, is no issue at all.
There is nothing I can do with software bottleneck (and we already run highly overclocked i9 7980XE and 2990WX as our workstations), but my scenes happily open under 20 seconds (I run very little plugins, almost none). So additional 20 seconds that would take through traffic, would highly annoy me.
Last, it's absolute must to even get full random access speeds from any network SSD, I never care about sequential outside of our photographic work.
Regarding actual true fileserver vs NAS cost. It's not few hundreds we're talking that become insignificant. By the time we're talking 10 Sata inputs, and enough PCI-e lanes to feed multiple NVMe drives at same time, plus 1-2 10GBit nics extendability, the price difference becomes very high, and the NAS will still be utterly inferior in performance.
I am not against them, I had two Synology models but the price premium is for comfort, minimalism and hassle-free setup. But any semi-literate hardware enthusiast can setup all on regular PC and reap so many benefits.
For me, every single second of latency I can feel anywhere, is something I can't stand. And I am not alone this, you mentioned this point of single-core performance being very important in task-to-task haptics and people who migrate even from top-grade high-turbo Xeon models back to HEDT systems because they can't stand even the smallest perceivable latency, I see and feel the same difference between files flowing through 10gbe network from powerful fileserver.
Few years ago, you couldn't even get 10GBe NAS at <1k pricepoint. QNAP was the only one, Synology has 1.5k model. And they didn't even support retail parts. Now the situation is much better but for me the majority of NAS devices are not enough powerful for intensive access until we get to pricepoint where they don't longer make sense to me for non-corporate clients.
