Oftentimes slow is fine, when the work is parallel and the hardware is cheap

which, sadly, isnt the case right now

It is the case for embedded microcontrollers. An ESP32-C series is about as cheap as you can get a WiFi controller, and it includes one or more RISC-V cores that can run custom software. The Raspberry Pi Pico and Milk-V Duo are both a few dollars and include both ARM and RISC-V view. with all but the cheapest Duo able to run Linux.