If you are cross shopping a full single board computer (Pi) with a microcontroller (arduino/esp32 etc) for a project, it's almost always a sign you don't know what you are doing. With the exception of the recent Pi Pico, non of the raspberry pis are Arduino/microcontroller competitors - they are typically full blown linux computers with all the benefits and drawbacks that provides.
While you can absolutely solve microcontroller-style problems with full blown computers, it's rarely the best/cheapest option.
The bigger concern is the overhead of the Linux OS in terms of interacting with it vs just flashing a microcontroller... but linux lets you run an SSH and FTP servers and wifi and a debugger on the thing easily.
So you get easier access to remotely playing with the programming of your gizmo, but you have the OS in the way of just talking to hardware in real-time. I haven't done projects like that since my undergrad, does it really make that much difference?
To me the big deal-breaker would probably be if the thing I was building was battery-powered.
I recently was doing a few projects with the Arduino Every, which is a nice board - but it's just too expensive. I did fry a few - so now I'm just using them as development board (the additional UARTs help a lot there), and for the actual project still use Nanos where I no longer care about the serial debug output, and therefore am fine with just the one serial port.