I ran software transcoding tests on my bare RPi5 with the Pi foundation's SC1148 active cooler.
While my RPi4B was unable to software transcode 1080i source content, and had limited success on 720p and 480i content, my RPi5 was able to transcode 1080i/720p/480i content at 1-8Mbit quality.
The 15 minute load for transcoding 1080i at 8Mbit is ~3.5 at <60C. A single 1-6Mbit stream is fully usable with the load dropping to about 1.3 for a 1MBit stream.
The RPi4 hardware transcoding has several problems that the RPi5 software transcoding solves.
Agreed with others on economic Intel Quick Sync Video hardware transcoding platforms.
My RPi5 fills my needs to reliably stream at 1-6Mbit through my 9Mbit uplink.