One good thing about using 500Mbps is it us easy to saturate the link with wireless connection, using a decent AC router or cheap WiFi 6 routers.
On the other hand, it was not easy to saturate the 1Gbps link with wireless AC routers previously, as majority of the clients are only 2*2 80MHz with the theoretical max speed of 867Mbps and lower practical speed of around 500-600Mbps at close range with a good router. Now with WiFi 6 clients being more common (AX wireless adapters are inexpensive for PC and Laptop) and the cost of WiFi 6 AX routers going down, it is finally not difficult to get 800Mbps+ speed. So 1Gbps is kind of finally "worth" it in this aspect.
On the other hand, this 500Mbps or 1Gbps speed refers to the internet speed, not your internal network. Majority of the server's, especially outside Singapore, can not sustain 500Mbps anyway. So 500Mbps is more value for money in this aspect. And take note streaming 4K UHD Netflix only needs 25Mbps, so you are unlikely to saturate the 500Mbps bandwidth with working from home plus home based learning. The issues are not really with the 500Mbps plan, but rather with the home network setup or the servers (Zoom, Skype, Google Meets, Microsoft Teams, company VPN servers, etc).
As for within the home network, there is no issues to use AX routers to get faster wireless connection speed with the home (800Mbps+) with 500Mbps plan, for example, to get fast speed from the NAS, because you are dealing with the intranet or internal network here.