[weweweoo]

Yes, the pi is perfectly fine for many projects, and in fact I have a couple of old pi's (even the original pi 1!) running tasks, such as listening sensors over bluetooth, pihole as DNS server etc.

The reason I prefer mini-pc's over pi is the x86 architecture and possibility to add more RAM. For maximum flexibility, I mostly run my self-hosted services inside virtual machines that I manage with Proxmox, and pi isn't ideal for that. Admittedly I found even the mini-pc's too limited due to lack of space/pcie slots for a GPU, and ended up with a custom desktop build. That allows me to experiment with stuff like self-hosted AI, and game remotely. Support for ECC RAM and more SSD's was a big plus too.

So, indeed it all depends on what and how much you want to do with the machines.