I mean the thing with the raspberry pi in your example is there is even cheaper microcontrollers that are just about as easy to develop for as the raspberry pi.

I mean the thing with the raspberry pi in your example is there is even cheaper microcontrollers that are just about as easy to develop for as the raspberry pi. The ESP’s of the world are almost an order of magnitude cheaper and are specifically designed for such scenarios. However those ESP chips ate the lunch of a whole line of other more specialized microcontrollers. So your argument still stands.