I'm vegan and have given up almonds because I'm prone to kidney stones, and I was told that almonds have a much higher oxalate content than other nuts. Not everyone has a tendency to form kidney stones, but in my case it seems like I started to suffer from them right around the time that grocery stores and cafés started to switch from soy milk to almond milk, so I think that may have been the biggest problem. (I haven't had any more stones so far since switching to oat milk and starting to take citrate pills every day.)

I still eat a fair amount of nuts, often peanuts, which are lower in oxalate. I appreciate cashew (and coconut!) as an alternative to almonds that are still high in fat, like for making ice cream out of. I think one reason almonds and almond milk have been so popular is their pleasantly high fat content.

I don't have any particular intuition for how much water these other nuts take to produce.