Love the effort you've put into this question. You've clearly done some quality research and thinking.
When I asked myself this same question a couple of years ago, I ended up just buying a second hand Synology NAS to use alongside my mini-pc. That would meet your criteria, and avoids the (I'm not sure what magnitude) reliability risk of using disks connected over USB. It's more proprietary than I'd like, but it's battle tested and reliable for me.
One I'm writing. I use the host file system (as I have a strong preference for simple) for it's storage, but I'm interested in adding Litestream for replicating the database onto AWS.