Your design is even simpler, using just an FT245 chip. Surprisingly, that FT245 cost $4.80, only 20 cents cheaper than the Raspeberry Pico that I'm using, and the final BOM cost differs by only $2.
I love that it fits in an enclosure (at the cost of needing more space in the back.)
The only reason I made this is because I wanted there to be a more generic (not tied to a particular sbc, not tied to any particular software) and open source option for the key hardware part of retroprinter.
Well for future-proofing and open sourceness, code that runs on an mcu or hdl to configure an fpga is better than this because in this all the magic is inaccessable and immutable inside that chip, while code or hdl can be shared, modified, iterated, used 20 years later regardless if FTDI or myself are still around or not, and by a 12 year old kid with no money or permission. Even if the pico goes away, and even if the code is making full use of the pico's special pio features, the code is still useful, while if this chip goes away, there's essentially nothing left here that's useful.
And of course obviously the pico (or any mcu or fpga) is infinitely more flexible than whatever's hardcoded in the ftdi chip. And no worries that FTDI will release a driver that bricks your chip some day.