Personally I find microPython to be an easier path. async/await based cooperative multi-tasking works well for me. Latest project driving 6 stepper motors and a variety of LEDS and scanning buttons - all in what appears to be real-time to the user.
It is still surprises me how many don't grasp how little we had available to us, and still managed to use high level languages.
I'm old-school. Start by reading datasheets and then try out the simplest thing that could work and iterate from there. In general, I find third-party libraries more complex than my needs require.
Took me a fair bit of reading microPython documentation and experimentation to fully grok the capabilities of the tasking model and event_loops. But once I got over that, it lead to clean, single responsibility class implementations.
I can't say that I'm too familiar with PIO but a tiny bit of state (literally a few bits) and a few bytes of code should be enough to make a good driver and offload the whole task from the CPUs.
I know RP2040 has dual CPU but motor control is often the job of a timer on other uCs.
On a microcontroller, you could use PIO or I think the RMT peripheral or even just interrupt-driven pin poking.
That's good for many use cases, although I strongly suspect it would fall over once you tried a very high step rate with microstepping (I run at 800-6400 step/sec) but I will try this out both for my lightweight test steppers (which use AccelStepper) as well as my microscope (which uses FluidNC). The scope will make it quite clear if we lose steps as I have a visual reference (the microscope slide has a calibrated fiducial marker).