I agree, once you factor in a power supply (or PoE hat), case and storage a Raspberry Pi really isn’t all that cheap anymore nowadays. Unless you have a project that specifically benefits from the GPIO pins or the form factor, just get a cheap barebones mini PC or a used one with RAM and SSD already included.
This will get you a system that’s way more powerful even if it’s a couple of years old (the Pi’s SoC is fairly weak) and I/O throughput is no contest, normally with at least a dozen PCIe lanes to use for NVMe storage or 10 gigabit network cards, if you so desire.