[xani_]

There is vast spread of FPGA sizes, so on affordability side it's definitely possible and some people did it.

The "problem" is really that you can do a LOT with MCUs, and programming FPGAs is very different than microcontrollers serially executing your code so they are pretty niche.

Like, if you for example needed to drive few thousand neopixels techncially FPGA would be perfect use case, just make a blob of memory and a bunch of serializers that feed each chain of LEDs.

... or you can just use some DMA magick on some fast STM32 and hack it out without having to learn new programming language.