If you need to use the GPIOs, have size or power consumption restrictions then the Pi makes total sense. But for general purpose computing like a run of the mill home server, a low power x86 can replace a handful of Pis more efficiently.

A $3 esp32 can do a lot for a microcontroller

And you can probably do away with a 1$ ESP8266 for your GPIO needs.

The idea was that a Pi makes sense sometimes, and other times it doesn't. I know people using a Pi for one GPIO pin. This can be done just fine with an Arduino or an ESP8266.

I for one run a Pi with PiHole, Wireguard, Unifi controller, NVR, MQTT, etc. and a few more GPIO trinkets like Zwave. No ESP could practically handle all that, an x86 would be overkill in terms of size, noise, temperature, and power consumption.

On the other hand I use ESPs for things like "smartening up" my door intercom where even a Pi Zero would be overkill.

> No ESP could practically handle all that

You probably would be surprised what they can handle... See these examples:

https://github.com/ciniml/WireGuard-ESP32-Arduino

https://github.com/martin-ger/esp32_nat_router

I much prefer working on my fast Ryzen "NUC" to a Pi4, but for electronics tinkering, I miss it having decent memory-mapped GPIO+SPI+I2C. From time to time, I search around in case someone's done a nice PCIe (or M.2?) card with a handful of I2C and SPI buses plus a bunch of GPIOs, but haven't found anything decent.

Ironically, I'd be happy to pay much more than the cost of a entire Pi4 to get the same GPIO as an add-on for a fast, reliable amd64 machine.