Yeah. I just bought 6 ESP32-S3 with external antenna for €48... So yeah, the ESPs are still very affordable.

But it's true that Raspberries and similar boards have become very expensive. It might be worth looking at the second hand market. Personally I have started replacing most of my old Raspberry Pi 3b projects with used Intel NUCs, where each NUC can replace several Raspberry Pis in performance.