Interesting. I may be outdated

1) raspberry pis competitors have gotten better, that nuc is very cheap.

2) the pi has gone in a different direction, increasing specs and price, the 3b+ or 4a had much lower specs, price, power consumption etc...

In conclusion, if you can get an arm soc board with specs similar to the 3b+ or 4a (500mb to 2gb ram), then you can host a blog on linux for cheap. Should run you in the 50$ area. But raspberry no longer makes these, you might look into the thousands of competitors.

Additionally if you want something more serious, nucs become reasonable, while it's hard to tell whether two 50$ pis or one 200$ Intel NUC would be better. It depends on the tradeoffs.

Absolutely. I wouldn't suggest one shouldn't use a Pi if it fits their use case and budget, simply that once we get to a higher end Pi, it can be cost effective to simply buy a mini PC which will be more capable for not a lot more money.

The issue with competing ARM SBCs is the software support; Radxa makes some boards that are more powerful than Pis, but if you read the forums they've had hardware flaws in the designs, and they run old kernels and don't get updated, and of course there isn't the community behind it.

An x86 mini pc is a different beast to a Pi, but then I think a lot of people who were hosting software on a Pi weren't specifically looking for ARM architecture anyway, unless they were, in which case stick with a Pi.