[briHass]

I think RPis have pretty much outgrown (outpriced?) their usefulness, except in very specialized applications:

If you want to run a server-task, listen to the common chorus and buy an 3-7 year old SFF business PC. Slap Proxmox on it, and you can virtualize a bunch of small 'servers' as LXCs with plenty of CPU and memory. Easy to add storage, dependable, and well-supported. Power draw is highly overstated for typical ancillary-server tasks, and if you were planning on 2+ Pis, you're now in the same ballpark.

If you want to hack together something with sensors/electronics, use a $5 ESP32, which likely has way more power than you need. If you need more processing power, move that from the edge device to something like the cheap SFF above. Plenty of sample ESP32/8266 Arduino libraries to expose/control the GPIO via a simple API, MQTT, or UDP/TCP payloads. Then, you can write your processing logic in whatever language you want, on a powerful server, and the edge device doesn't need Linux distro updates to blink some LED strips or whatever.