I think the reality is that a lot of people don’t use or care for the main Pi features like the GPIO pins or camera connectors, and aren’t using them in places where space or power is constrained. They’re purely looking for a cheap amount of compute.

For those use cases, it makes sense that performance per dollar is the top metric that many people look for. Pi used to be king there too, but as Pi prices have gone up and the price of other cheap compute has come down, it’s harder to justify the Pi. The Pi is still a great board, but a Pi5 with case, power supply, SD card will run you $100+ (throw in an SSD and you’re at $200+ easy), meanwhile an N100 PC can be had for the same price.