I don't mean this with snark, but who did they land on? I have struggled to place the Pi for a long time because the range of things it can do is so broad, but then it gets limited by things like using an SD card for primary storage (which can fail). So while this could be a perfectly good home server, I wouldn't be able to rely on the boot drive. It also makes a really good first computer, but leaving it naked doesn't mean I can slot it in front of my kiddos and hope they'll be fine. I keep a Pi running attached to a monitor in my kitchen running a Home Assistant dashboard, and that's pretty good, but is that the sweet spot?

The Pi 5 (and 4?) can boot from external hard drives, including NVMe SSDs over PCIe. Granted, you're limited to PCIe 2.0 x1 (~1 Gb/s) or USB 3 (5 Gb/s), but the point still stands.