The article makes it sound they cost over $1,000 (USD?) and were impossible to find but here in Australia I never had any issues finding and unless you were going for the extreme versions, there closer to $5-600AUD which made them a great fit. All we can hope is that there’s a few other brands who are willing to fill the space with equal quality products.
That was for new entry level specs, you could obviously spend a lot more on the highest specs but often the NUC fit a segment that didn’t need to be bleeding edge of performance.