Unless you're really using the GPIO pins or other weird I/O, I really fail to see the purpose in having an 8GB or 16GB RAM Raspberry Pi (at a much higher price than it used to be) as a desktop workstation with a GUI on it.

The idea of putting sixteen gigs of RAM in a raspberry pi is nuts. The legit thing you want to use a raspberry pi (or a competitor) for as an embedded headless thing with no KB/mouse/display attached should run fine in 2GB of RAM or less, assuming an ordinary debian-based OS environment.

I would much rather have a used, ex-corporate/ex-lease, small form factor or ultra small form factor x86-64 desktop PC (Dell, HP, Lenovo, whatever) with 16GB of RAM in it and an SSD on a SATA3 or NVME interface. Whatever is the "best" SFF that you can buy via huge eBay used equipment dealers on any given month.

Despite being many years old, whatever you can buy on ebay for 200 bucks (at least before the recent RAM fiasco) with some recent-ish quad core core i5/i7 or Ryzen in it will run circles around a raspberry pi 5.