You know, he has a video on that too. If you want GPIO, a tiny PC is not the answer (for example).

I need to try one of these USB GPIO thingies. Add GPIO to, well, any computer?

Adafruit FT232H Breakout - General Purpose USB to GPIO, SPI, I2C - USB C & Stemma QT: https://www.adafruit.com/product/2264

Adafruit MCP2221A Breakout - General Purpose USB to GPIO ADC I2C - Stemma QT / Qwiic: https://www.adafruit.com/product/4471

Mini PCs don't come with GPIOs, which are one of the main reasons that make small SBCs a better choice for some uses. Not a big problem though as there are cheap add on boards bringing GPIO ports to every device. Example: https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/usb-io-board/

The downside is that code becomes slightly more complicated, the upside is that it makes easier to replace the Mini PC with a totally different one, or even emulate it in a VM then connecting the GPIO board using USB pass through.

Rethinking GPIO can also open more possibilities such as putting them beyond a network (say Arduino+ENC28j60 and similar ones for Ethernet, ESP32 for wireless, etc); of course having them outside the main CPU will imply some speed and latency issues, although I'm sure they would remain unnoticed for many non critical use cases.

My question would rather be why the RPi when there are better SBCs out there, but that is my personal taste and the Armbian and DietPi communities being more than enough for me.