If you mean Raspberry Pi specifically, it's extremely overpriced and there are way better alternatives for a much better price. Orange Pi is the first that comes to mind due to naming, but there are also many more.

If you mean hardware overall, look into the used market. Older systems are perfectly fine for hobbyist/home server applications, you can find/build a cheap computer that will serve you well. From someone who is utterly broke - this is very much still possible.

What truly sucks is gaming, LLMs and other hardware-demanding applications. There you do need fancy hardware, and it will cost you a kidney or two. This is where things get very grim.