The gpio pins always made it a bit of a weird middle ground between a used NUC-type and an arduino and all the years since the pi1 have just shrunken the possible use cases for it as mini pcs have gotten cheaper and arduino-likes have gotten more powerful.

Imagine RISCV-berry pi tho that would be sex.

Not really though, given there's tons of cheap MCUs with the same or even more GPIOs available, and a USB/Wifi/Bluetooth connection away from doing the exact same thing as a Pi does. Could even whip up a linuxgpio driver that talks to your ESP32 fw and makes the same devfs gpiochipN endpoint available...

Yeah :(
I wonder if other SBCS are similarly speced but cheaper

Same

Well your mistake was going for 1GB.

That's barely enough for a basic headless server nowadays, let alone a full media suite.