The interesting thing about this is that it's a RISC-V machine, at least for me. A few years ago RISC-V dev boards were much more expensive than their ARM counterparts, nowadays they still are but are getting closer in price parity.

I just bought one of these esp32 boards with risc-v chip off adafruit a couple days ago: https://www.adafruit.com/product/5337

I think they are positioned to be the new low-cost esp32 variant.

Yes, but those are microcontrollers. This is a computer on a chip with mmu, and three cores, 64MB ram.

The NanoPi Duo has 4 cores and 512MB of RAM which is super usable. Includes WiFi etc. I'm not sure why RISC-V is such a draw here, considering the boards limitations.