I think it’s the simplicity of it that is deceptive; the RPi and other alternatives work great in experienced hands. In particular when the user can detect any early sign of an issue or is good enough to quickly diagnose what’s going wrong, fix it in 5 min and forget about it, it looks like a cute trivial little cheap machine that just works fine.
It takes looking at a kid or less experienced users working through a task for 5~10 mon to realize how much the hardware/software has to be flexible and permissive to make the user successful.
I haven't seen a single piece of evidence that anyone can get Chromium to smoothly stream video under Raspian Bullseye (or any other distro for that matter).
It's definitely not representative of the best that Linux desktops have to offer now.
After you go to the trouble of figuring which Chromium startup flags will get a minimally watchable streaming experience, she will then complain that the mouse is broken. When you ask her, "What do you mean the mouse is broken? I didn't touch the mouse," she replies, "I mean it doesn't move when I move it."
Then you'll notice that one of your Chromium flags has mysteriously caused sporadic jank for the mouse pointer. And you'll try to explain that it's not broken, there's just some kind of unpredictable latency in the pointer motion.
She'll then reply, "Right, it's broken."
And you'll stand there, defeated, staring into the frozen eyes of Colin Firth for five straight seconds as you finally begin to comprehend that "entry level desktop" doesn't mean what you thought it did.