Ask HN: Alternatives to Raspberry Pi for home IoT projects?

I would consider buying used thinclients on eBay. For $25 you used to be able to get a Celeron with 4gb ram and 16gb sata flash drive with a proper enclosure. And many are upgradable to8gb of ram and a larger SSD.

ESP32? On the firmware side I've been pretty happy with ESP Rainmaker: https://rainmaker.espressif.com

For lots of tasks the Pi Pico is a good choice, serving up a simple web page or managing some gpio

Orange Pi