I don't expect to need to transcode beyond 1080p (having the option for 4k would be nice, but far from essential), and we're talking 2 simultaneous streams maximum. Storage wise, I have a bunch of big desktop drives knocking about I can use, but I'm not opposed to using a suitably powerful NAS either.

Noise/heat isn't too much of an issue as this will go in my office, but I would prefer something that's not too noisy.

I'm looking to spend about £300-£400, could stretch to £500 if I get some extra bells and whistles.

Does anyone have their own builds they could share or suggestions for suitable hardware that's reasonably easy to purchase?

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I've been using the same setup previously, on a slower node, but with only outbound bandwidth measured. There I mounted my music from pCloud.

On this new node I figured I would try out/use @koofr. So I mounted the drive, using

/usr/bin/rclone mount --uid 1000 --gid 1000 --syslog --stats 1m \
  -v --allow-other --read-only  myKoofr:/music/ /srv/music/

I installed plexmediaserver and added 149 GB of music to the library, from that Koofr-rclone mount.
That triggered Plex to download ~900 GB of data ...
(Actually jumped in at ~600 and tried figuring out what's going on. By then it was halvway through indexing/scanning the library. @AnthonySmith suggested I could try to add --ignore-checksum, so I did. This might have helped, as it "only" used 300 GB for scanning the last 150 GB.

I also tried pCloud, and I tried adding some more options for caching, using something like this:

/usr/bin/rclone mount --uid 1000 --gid 1000 --syslog --stats 1m \
  --buffer-size 1G --no-modtime --dir-cache-time 90m \
  --cache-dir /tmp/rclone-cache --vfs-cache-mode full \
  --vfs-cache-max-size 1G \
  -v --allow-other --read-only --ignore-checksum \
  my-pcloud:/music/ /srv/music/

Still a rescan of my library used 150 GB of traffic. Maybe --no-modtime prevents it from seeing ctime/mtime, so it has to re-download every file to check ... D'oh!

Trying again, a Scan Library Files after removing that option, with only 3 albums (re)added, it seems that still triggered a full re-download ... (Actually waiting for it to finish, but looks like it's downloading a lot.) I would think Plex stored in it's db the timestamps etc, so it wouldn't have to redownload everything every time.

I've seen recommendations on using sshfs instead, but this makes me curious ... I could of course try davs/dav2s (the cloud providers don't offer ssh, I think). But users like @Mason and @Wolveix do run rclone (albeit with GSuite, IIRC), so it should be feasible.
If nightly rescan triggers redownload of every file, it's really not very nice ... Not a vital service for me, of course, but it triggers my curiosity.

Maybe I'm missing something obvious, or maybe you have some insight to share on this?

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