Right, but if there's 8 lanes to spare, and I could use 4 for a 10GbE NIC and 4 for another NVMe drive, that's better than wasting all 8 on one of those functions and not being able to install the other at all.
Isn't 4 lanes for a 10 GbE NIC a complete overkill? Two lanes should be plenty. One would do, assuming your combined full duplex bandwidth doesn't exceed 16 Gbps (minus overhead).
For PCIe4, 4 lanes corresponds to 64 Gbps of bandwidth.
