Perhaps when you factor in development/engineering time. The machine is only a part of the cost of an automation project.
There are cheaper alternatives, but there are not better supported alternatives. The most expensive rPi is a rounding error in terms of engineering time. Why bother saving ~$30 if you have to spend $1k worth of engineering time to diagnose a compatibility issue on some less well documented board.
You can also reduce your write wear with putting stuff like temporal logs in ram etc.
* depending on volume.
For a couple hundred/thousand devices doing industrial automation yes. For a million and up, it makes sense to pay an engineer 3 months to reduce the BOM by 10 cents.
Our volume would be well below 1 million at market saturation. More important for us to be able to iterate and customize.