I'm honestly not even sure what a good use case is for a Raspberry Pi proper at this point. It sits somewhat awkwardly between things that microcontrollers can handle(*) and things that, as you mentioned, NUCs or old computers or used laptops (or even used phones!) with removed batteries can handle.

*: I am so glad we're finally out of the phase where people were using Pis for hobbyist tasks where an Arduino would have worked just fine. Especially now that there are so many cheap, accessible microcontrollers. ESP32s obviously, but Raspberry's own RP2040/RP2350 have been more useful to me than the Pis themselves ever were.