I feel like it kind of needs to be said, ever since RaspberryPis stopped being price-competitive. Most of the original sales pitch for why you should adopt an extremely weird proprietary ARM-variant was centred on price.
• GPIO for hacking - basically an Arduino but a real computer
• Low power use (practical to run from a battery for some purposes)
• Tiny form-factor
Price seemed to be more of an "it doesn't matter that much if you break it while hacking with it" factor than a reason-to-buy.
https://www.raspberrypi.org/files/about/RaspberryPiFoundatio...
Incidentally that slide deck mentions the pi zero - which is still very cheap (the 2w is about $20 where I live), so I guess they're still honouring that even if their fancy one is pricy-ish.
Edit: I also found this article from before the original pi release https://hackaday.com/2011/05/06/miniature-pc-packs-a-big-pun...
The comments in that thread are very focused on the price point (many doubting it could hit $25, which it actually did reach) so I stand corrected; it was clearly part of both the marketing and the attraction.
With the exception of the Zero, Pi has always been playing in the realm of "this is a real computer, except cheaper". And that's a pretty crowded space these days.
Why would someone buy a Pi5 when they can get more power for the same price?