You might've skimmed over the rest of my comment, but my focus was on another type of tinkerer - and maybe that was my bad, I guess "lite homelabber" might have been a more apt description. Raspberry Pis used to be huge among people who wanted a low power device to host useful services. I myself was one of those people once. I never used the GPIO pins, but even today a Pi is my DNS (PiHole) and Home Assistant server. It was a great device to serve as an intro to self-hosting, but with where they've taken pricing and as you said, where the market has gone, they've become all but irrelevant in that space.