Not necessarily any more. The new TMC5160 drivers have changed that radically: It is a cheap and capable driver chip with all the back EMF measurement goodies but it uses external mosfets to pump current through the motor. So in theory the sky is the limit with these chips (well in practice it’s not that simple but I’ll not dive into that). The fancy new Duet 3 boards have six of these with big enough mosfets to support 4A RMS each. This is well in NEMA 23 territory and the entire control board costs $230 at the moment which starts to drift into the “cheap” realm already, especially if compared to a setup with dedicated driver “boxes”. I’ve also seen some cheap “oversized” stepsticks appearing. It’s only a matter of time one can get a board with 5x4A capability for less than $100. You do want at least 24V though but due to LED lights being super popular nowadays, these power supplies are dirt cheap. To be honest, even with NEMA 17-s, I’d rather run the system at 24V to give me more headroom at higher speeds.
Now that said, 0.59Nm NEMA 17-s are more than enough for MPCNC.
Here’s a video of my MPCNC lifting about 12lb of weight with its X axis (the big lead block is 10lb, the small is 2lb), no problem. Cutting forces like these are in the “big boy” router territory. If I were to apply a force like that to the end of the cutter, MPCNC middle gantry would bend like a reed in the wind.