Looking at Raspberry Pi prices inside EU, I can get 8 core laptops for a cheaper price, with display, dGPU et al.
No idea what happened, but Raspberry Pis are super expensive for the last couple years, which is why I decided to just go with used Intel NUCs instead. They cost around 80-150EUR and they use more electricity but they are a quite good bang for the buck, and some variants also have 3x HDMI or Gbit/s ethernet or m2 slots you can use to have a SATA RAID in them.
Same.. switched over during the pandemic when full on N95/100 systems were cheaper than just the RPi board by itself. More compute/ram, faster storage, included case and power, fewer headaches.