Yes to part of this -- like most of these technologies (e.g. TB5), there's backwards compatibility but performance generally reduces to the lowest spec'd item in the chain. In this case, at least the LAN cables and any switches would need to be 10GbE.
Assuming this is going in a home/SOHO rather than an enterprise/etc, the NAS and/or router would also need to be 10GbE if there is to be any value to this, too. And not much sense in a 10GbE router if actual internet service is <2.5GbE anyway.
However, for the NAS use case, it wouldn't need to be NVMe SSD. A small 5-bay RAID of HDD could push close to 1 GByte/second. That's ~ 10Gb.
Beelink's decision to go with 2.5GbE doesn't cause me any problems but I don't understand it. I don't need 10GbE where I would use this and I am not in the market for a dock like this right now anyway. However, I am curious what's the engineering or cost trade-off that landed them on 2.5GbE over 10GbE? Then I feel like we're always buying for the future -- or at least what we buy now won't be the bottleneck in the near future. I am not even sure I really need more than the >2.5GB/second SSD performance I have now, but in 2026 I probably wouldn't buy a new enclosure that's less than USB4 nor a NVMe SSD that's less than Gen4x4.
