For eg. for 100€ you can find an HP Mini with an i5 8th gen + 16GB of ram + 256GB NVME that obviously has a case, a LOT of I/O, PCIe (m2) comes with a power adapter and outperforms a RPi5 in all possible ways. Note that the RPi5 8GB of ram will cost you 80€ + case + power adapter + cable + bullshit adapter + SD card + whatever else money grab - the Pi isn’t just a good option.
RPi 2B+ for around 10$ nowadays (…) other brand new cheap SBCs such as the Radxa Zero 3W or the Zero 3E or even the Raspberry Pi Zero W. The point is that it doesn’t make sense to buy a standard and expensive RPi for things that don’t require much CPU. If you don’t really need an OS and you code C or MicroPython a 3.5$ ESP32 board as well.