I never understood complaints about drive expansion or networking tbh. Even many years ago, it seems like dual NICs was standard even for mITX boards with the added bonus many of them had WiFi even if that's not a huge boon for desktop usage, but it also, usually means bluetooth (since most wifi cards be they mPCIe or M.2 are combined modules) which was never something ypu could count on for bigger boards. As for storage, how many drives do you need? In my own experience, trying to cram more drives in is less efficient than just fewer, larger drives, and if you want to run a proper RAID array, the onboard HBA isn't going to cut it, so ITX fails by not having a second slot for a RAID card rather than not having enough drive connectors.
I will agree on the troubles getting a proper cooler to fit with everything being so cramped. I never understood why there haven't been any manufacturers bold enough to try switching to SODIMMS or replacing a quartet of SATA connectors with a miniSAS connector and putting the proper cable in the box. There's a LOT of space manufacturers could be saving.
Even on the AMD side, it isn't that fantastic. Even the most recent Vega 11 is only pushing 30-40 FPS on lower resolutions, and motherboard manufacturers haven't been taking advantage of freesync by putting DP ports on their motherboards (HDMI freesync monitors are often newer and more expensive and it's a crapshoot whether or not a given motherboard supports freesync over HDMI)
As far as I can tell, STX is very much intended to be an OEM thing much like Thin Mini ITX was. We'll see if it suffers the same fate, or if it picks up consumer uses like mPCIe and M.2 did. MXM is still probably the biggest issue with MXM cards, when you can actually find one, being more expensive than the equivalent desktop card
