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Raspberry Pi Zero 2 is the sweet spot these days for price/performance, but it's nowhere to by found in stock, sadly despite the fact it has LPDDR2 type of RAM

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It would be a heck of a lot more useful if it had a basic (even 100Mbps) wired ethernet interface on it, then you could put it places without worrying about its horrid 802.11n-only 2.4 GHz only wifi with tiny antenna, be assured it had a reliable ethernet connection, and power it by a cheap 802.3af-to-MicroUSB 5V2A PoE splitter.

It's weird there's cheap and plentiful STM32 series things with physical ethernet ports (but they're very weak microcontrollers with little CPU or RAM) which do manage to have real ethernet ports on them...

It's less weird when you understand that the SoC it uses was built for use in smartphones. The Ethernet port on equivalent Raspberry Pi (non-Zero) models is actually just a USB adapter. Built-in Ethernet support only comes with the Raspberry Pi 4 and newer.

Sure, but they could logically glue a physical ethernet port onto the USB bus on a zero the same way it's on the USB bus on a 3B+... The BOM cost would be what, a few dollars at most for a cheap 8P8C jack and the ethernet chip.

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