Nowadays, I just get old laptops with broken screens and take the mainboard out. They are dirt cheap, often even have 16GB of RAM, you can just dump pretty much any linux on them and they are usually way faster than Pis.

The boards are of course bigger, which I guess will be a non-starter for many. They'll also require active cooling unless you downclock them considerably. They often also require more power, although many mainboards can be configured down two a few watts of power consumption, depending on what peripherals and speed you need.

Yeah, it's more work than just getting a Pi, but given the current prices, it makes sense for me.

The main reason is that they are one of the few ARM computers sold with a pre-installed officially supported GNU/Linux distribution, at affordable prices.

Even with the prices increases that the PI has suffered, there no systems of vendors like Tuxedo, or System 76, at similar price point, with ARM support.

Well that's because for the Pi you have GPIO. If you just want to run homelabs or software only stuff, why not go for ITX motherboard with just in time components

kernel wont get updates, no IO, no ports.

Need to fuck about pretty much per phone model,rather than install Debian, unattended-upgrades and forget about device for 2 years

For me if I don't have a need for the GPIO pins, it's "why get an expensive pi when I can get a used ex-corporate small form factor quad core, intel core i7-something desktop PC with 16GB of RAM and a real SSD"... For like 150 bucks on eBay. RAM apocalypse and price of equipment has affected this a lot (these used to be like 90 bucks depending on era of core i7), but they're vastly more useful when a general purpose x86-64 linux is installed on them. Or even just put proxmox on it and then various things inside that.