I would say there's a huge performance gap between the most powerful Pi and even a Nuc mini from 6 years ago. Hard to consider them in the same ballpark, use-case-wise.
The NUCs had a pretty wide range of processor options, and often fairly-old ones with low core counts from lower-end processor lines were still for sale—but never at what felt like the correct price to me, especially since they usually needed memory and a disk (the ones that came with those seemed like an even worse deal)
Even the low-end NUCs are much faster than the fastest Pi.
Strange this was downvoted. I put together a VR-capable nuc for under $1k, definitely not even in the same ballpark as a pi.
I’ve done Coremark scores across a range of different systems including NUCs and Pi’s.
A Pi 4 gets a single thread score of about 10k and a new entry level NUC gets about 20k.
If you look at older systems a Beelink T4 Pro Mini (using a much older CPU) gets about 11k well within the same ballpark as a Pi4. Comparing that to a similar aged Pi a Pi3B gets about 4k score.
For comparison a high end AMD Ryzen gets about 45K.
Even my 2017 NUC had NVMe, I’d say that gives it a leg up.