I’ve said this other places but an x64 processor is probably better value these days unless you need video and GPIOs on the same device for some reason.

Even then, you can get a USB to GPIO adapter. I don’t use RPis much these days and it’s kind of a shame because RPi + Python usually has a quicker dev loop than C + esp-idf. I need 5 of some of them though, and I’m not buying a dozen RPis these days.