An Intel NUC is not much more than the top tier Raspberry Pi, once you get a case and stuff it needs, but is orders of magnitude faster. I got one and installed Linux Mint on it. It's a much, much better system than the Raspberry Pi 4 I have.
I bought my pi 4 at launch in 2020 before the shortages and scalping, it was $49 IIRC. There is no Intel NUC that's only 50 bucks. And I like that the pi is aarch64 architecture as I am developing for that architecture.
I was using a Raspberry Pi v1 as my NAS for years. It was fast enough and got the job done to my satisfaction. However when that pi eventually died and I tried to replace it, I found that v4 Pis were 1) just as expensive as NUCs, and 2) not even available for purchase anywhere that I could find. So now I've got a NUC filling that role. The Raspberry Pi org has really dropped the ball.
That is unfortunate about the R Pi. I got a 3B+ a year before 2020 and it better last a long time.
I think the foundation’s pressures are similar to Apple’s pressure to upsell their paid service all over the UI. That’s what I resent about Apple; it’s enshittification like with EBay, Amazon and even Google bugging me to sign in to make searches.
It may depend on one's definition of "not much more". I got my Intel NUC in the barebones configuration since I already had spare 32GB of RAM and an SSD for $387.59. To me, that's not much more than the highest end Raspberry Pi 4 with a case with a heatsink and fan because the NUC: actually works and is usable, has DisplayPort and just generally better I/O aside from the Pi's GPIO, configurable memory, and better CPU and GPU. Plus, you can actually buy one. To me, that's worth it.
My Raspberry Pi's are just unusable for anything other than as high-level embedded platforms. I've started selling them off, only keeping one or two for embedded use cases.
