I’m a backer and can’t wait to receive the 8TB upgrade!
I had to buy an off the shelf M1 Studio due to a hardware failure, so I couldn’t wait for the lead time for one with more RAM and storage. It has been borderline unusable due to so many things requiring local storage — can’t even symlink to an external NVMe. (Many apps, but also Backblaze metadata and iMessage attachments)
You can’t symlink, but you can hardlink. I do that for iPhone backups.