Just use Monero like it's designed to be, and the problem go away. By using Monero as a bank account, if you don't live paychecks to paychecks, you are going to accumulate sufficient amount of output to never have to think about that.

Or you can do like other mentioned, but instead of sending to 10, sent to 16 (including change) or 15 (excluding change). Feather wallet coin control allow you that very easily.

Yeah, it's normal, you can't compare a NUC with a premium Tiny PC.

NUC have budget / low end CPU (In you're case, a Pentium Silver Jxxxx), While these tiny PC have Core i5 or Core i7. Can find model with 8th gen+ at very decent price.

Definitively

Small form factor tiny PC like a Lenovo Thinkcenter M720q or similar or an EliteDesk 800 or similar. They are very cheap used, have very decent CPU, usually 8GB or 16GB or more and a SSD.

Buying an overpriced and limited SBC instead of these is wasting money. Especially that you can upgrade them with a 4TB HDD & 2TB+ NVME drive, up to 64GB of ram. They have like 6 USB, 2 or 3 display output...

When they do almost nothing (like synced node for example), they use like 10Watts...

And you can mine on them too, and they are stackable :)