If you're happy with a Pi Zero for your use-case, then there probably isn't anything you'd appreciate about moving to a microcontroller. One big driver for mic

If you're happy with a Pi Zero for your use-case, then there probably isn't anything you'd appreciate about moving to a microcontroller. One big driver for microcontroller use is power, as you've suggested. A quick look on Google shows that the Pi Zero uses about 100mA at idle, and even its "sleep" mode uses 30 mA. In contrast, the esp32-c3 datasheet lists power consumption at 130 micro-Amps for light sleep and 5 micro-amps for deep sleep. If you want to run something on battery or small solar, you can go a lot farther with a microcontroller using power-efficient sleep. One other thing that might be relevant to some use-cases is deterministic realtime control. When your program is the only thing running on the processor, with no OS involved, you can have much more reliably control over your timing and latency. This isn't an area I know much about.