I have one and it still sucks. I ordered it after the one I bought on Amazon kind of sucked thinking the L1T would be better and it was worse than the Amazon one.
I've worked with quite a few ISPs and exchanges. I haven't set up port mirrors for the NSA but I have setup temporary mirrors for the FBI upon request.
IaaS is mostly like this already. There are some things where it’s not used like VMs which serverless tries to solve. Additionally people tend to waste tons of resources with IaaS because they don’t scale on usage.
My solution to this has been creating a public bastion server and use Wireguard. Wireguard listens on a random UDP port (port knocking is more difficult here.) This client is set up to have a dynamic endpoint so I don't need to worry about whitelisting. The key and port information are stored in a password manager like Vaultwarden with the appropriate documentation to connect. Firewall rules are set to reject on all other ports and it doesn't respond to ICMP packets either. A lot of that is security through obscurity but I found this to be a good balance of security and practicality.
If you’re not using any splitters and zero to a few couplers you can expect latency to be ~3ms with the model OP is using. You can easily achieve 1Gbps using NFS with 3-10ms of latency as long as the underlying hardware can support it. I would avoid doing block storage even over ethernet though, that should be reserved for DAC or fiber. These particular adapters are rated for 10W (5V/2A) and I doubt they use all of that. I haven’t seen any noticeable latency spikes using these either but your mileage will vary depending on your cabling and connections (especially older pre-digital cable splitters.)