ZFS dedupe is crazy dangerous. IXSystems had a client who backed virtual machines on the zfs server with dedupe. They had over 60 to 1 compression until they filled up their ram with their dedupe table. The problem was that the computer was already the most high end computer on the market. They had to wait 5 months for intel to release a new server line that could hold more memory before they could read any data from that pool.
Have you seen the epyc 8004?
amd is making an epyc mini. It is 1/2 an epyc using cut down epyc controller chips. 1P with up only 6 ram channels and 96 pcie channels. The CPUs start at $409 for an 8 core, or $639 for a 16 core.
I am currently running the epyc 9124 which is the cheapest cpu which would light up that motherboard. For an extra $800 system cost I don’t have to worry about running out of ram channels, pcie channels, or sata ports, and I get ECC.