That is just one of the possible uses and not the most important one. Pi’s have two things that regular PCs don’t have. They have a direct integration of an GPIO port where you can easily connect individual wires as needed and they have a huge community and a lot of tutorials and also software support for all kinds of tinker jobs that can make use of that GPIO port.
These two reasons have not gone away and for many of those, you don’t need the most expensive PI with 16GB of RAM. A Pi Zero for 14 EUR or a Pi Zero 2 for 22 EUR are perfectly fine for that. The platform has plenty of life left but those high end Pi are increasingly crazily priced, mainly because of insane RAM prices.
That is just one of the possible uses and not the most important one. Pi’s have two things that regular PCs don’t have. They have a direct integration of an GPIO port where you can easily connect individual wires as needed and they have a huge community and a lot of tutorials and also software support for all kinds of tinker jobs that can make use of that GPIO port.
These two reasons have not gone away and for many of those, you don’t need the most expensive PI with 16GB of RAM. A Pi Zero for 14 EUR or a Pi Zero 2 for 22 EUR are perfectly fine for that. The platform has plenty of life left but those high end Pi are increasingly crazily priced, mainly because of insane RAM prices.