100% agree. Is it ideal? Nah. Can you launch successful products with it with only a moderate amount of headache? Yep!
Heart of our system that powers a household name devices is a RISC-V multi-hart SoC. It does quite a bit - a little bit of compute, a little bit of DSP. Definitely not the best fit, but cheap and works well enough. The buggest gap for us was the lack of the decent debugging featurea like ARM's Data Watchpoint Traces - but maybe there is an extension for that already?