Curious how the "VA smear" is on this. Good enough for productivity use?

One thing Jellyfin is way better at is offline viewing. I have frequent internet outages at my house and I've run into issues multiple times where Plex wouldn't stream my own local media because it couldn't connect to the internet. For this, Jellyfin has always just worked.

Easiest way to tell is to transcode something and see if your CPU spikes. If it's offloaded to the GPU it shouldn't.

Also make sure you have it configured correctly. On your Admin Dashboard under Playback > Transcoding, check that Intel QuickSync (QSV) is selected.

I have an N100 (Intel 12th gen) so I think your settings should be similar. For mine I have pretty much everything checked except for VP8, the two HEVC RExt options, and "Allow encoding in AV1 format"

This seems like something that should be kept local. What's the point of all these NPUs otherwise

I used to have similar issues, was due to my PC not being able to handle the transcoding. Enabling hardware acceleration with the correct settings fixed it for me.