As there is another report in Installation NUC mit UEFI claiming that also Booting from DVD fails I had quick look at the Intel pages.
In general Intel is not Linux as as supported (https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000005628/mini-pcs.html), when asked in the Intel forum they are trying to hand over to the Linux vendors (see https://communities.intel.com/thread/129243).
There are some models listed that should work at least with Ubuntu (https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000005499/mini-pcs.html).
Finally the document https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000022600/mini-pcs.html claims that only 2 Options need to be set to install Ubuntu: AHCI for Chipset SATA-Mode and Legacy Boot. For OpenElec it is addionally required to disable UEFI-boot.
Looking at this document I’d expect that these options are still available. If not I’d ask the the vendor either to provide updated information or to provide a firmware that matches to the specs at least if I had one of these models.