Also, if you use an AV-receiver, you can switch all devices on with just the controller. That, in my eyes is a huge USP for the Steam Machine. Of course anyone can build a PC on a similar budget. But that won’t work as well as a living room gaming device.

Your main bottleneck seems to be RAM. In that case I’d just put in another 32 GB and then wait for this whole mess to sort itself out. DDR4 is less ridiculously overpriced than DDR5, so that should be doable without too much pain. If you spend a lot of money now, you’ll want to kick yourself when prices come back down to earth.