> There is a parallel situation happening with the “just buy an ESP32” arguments. If an ESP32 solves your problem, you also probably shouldn’t have been in the market for a Raspberry Pi.

I have mixed feelings on that.

For the longest time it was safe to say "just buy a Raspberry Pi" because they were cheap enough and powerful enough. If memory serves me correctly, the base board cost roughly the same as an Arduino Uno and offered considerably more. (Of course, there were cheaper Uno clones, but those depended upon support offered by official Arduino software development tools.)

While there are some projects which would only be possible with something like the Uno, there were far more projects that would only be possible with something like the Pi. So if you wanted to give generic go-to advice to a novice, the Pi it was.

The right advice is to use the right tool for the job, but that is something that a novice (or fly-by-night forum posters) aren't prepared to handle.

Of course, things change. There are more inexpensive microcontroller development boards and the microcontrollers themselves are much more powerful. While that doesn't negate the benefits of a Linux SBC, it does raise questions now that those SBCs are considerably more expensive.