Yeah, for the Mac Studio, which is likely to stay in one place, this probably works well. In actuality, I use a Macbook Pro, which has the same pricing issue.

In my experience, the fastest option for this is NFS without encryption, which is only really viable on a local network as it's hecking insecure (sure, wrap it in Wireguard, but now you're slowing it down again) and over Wifi at least, it's definitely slower than using an NVMe drive plugged into the Macbook, at least for 40 MP files coming out of my Fuji.

The external NVMe drive w/ Thunderbolt works... OK. But it's annoying (both physically and in terms of sleep/wake causing dismount warnings, etc.)