Price went up along with the hardware power though. RPi 1 had 700 Mhz and 512 MB of ram, versus rpi5 at 2.4 Ghz quad core modern arm, 800 MHz GPU, and from 1 to 16 GB of ram lol.

It went from "oh cool I can run a small web server easy! A full Linux computer can fit in my pocket and I can bring it anywhere!" to basically gaming laptop specs of that early era.

You can basically get a pi zero 2w for less today than the rpi 1, and it's smaller and more powerful than the rpi1. I would say the price is damn reasonable.

And the microcontroller options these days... You can get a TON for cheap.

I am not so sure since they are a for profit company now..