You hardly need gpio pins for anything these days, it's usually better to use usb native comms or a uart converter or an i2c bridge etc. The added bonus is that

You hardly need gpio pins for anything these days, it's usually better to use usb native comms or a uart converter or an i2c bridge etc. The added bonus is that you won't burn the expensive Pi when something goes wrong with the peripheral. ESPHome is usually the non-overkill solution when you just need a few sensors and actuators and don't have to also run the ML inference on the same node :)