The GPIO was always the point. Pis were supposed to be educational tools. People using them as cheap computers ruined it.
You ca get GPIO on the cheap from a Arduino, ESP8/32, or RP2040 microcontroller. RPi itself is far too wasteful for that.
> People using them as cheap computers ruined it.
False, industrial users using them in all commercial embedded products ruined it.
Almost nobody is using RPis as cheap computers at home since they suck at that: too expensive, too underpowered and too limited in functionality to be a computer for the average joe
My RPi 2 becomes an unusable stuttery mess when I open a web browser and for the price of a RPi 5 I got a used quad core Intel 8th gen laptop with 8GB of RAM and 256GB SSD which not only beats the RPi at any and all computer tasks, but it also comes with built in keyboard, 1080p monitor, battery, charger and I can take with me to do work on the go. The only thing I see the RPi good at at home is a headless PiHole/VPN or whatever, not as an actual desktop computer replacement.
Of course you can fall back to the previous standard idea - connecting an Arduino to another computer and communicating by the serial port.
IMO it is the people using them as embedded controllers for their products that ruined it, in combination with the poor decision by the Raspberry Pi folks to prioritize commercial demand for the products over hobbyist demand during the pandemic. We hobbyists "made do" with other solutions in that time, and now there's no real need to go back.