I agree with you about dev boards but I think their post was focused on things like used NUCs or other small x86 machines that are only marginally larger than a Pi in an enclosure and include literally everything you'd want (enclosure, pwa fan, SATA SSD, NVMe, wifi, etc.) and the software support is there (linux / windows).
Intel's finally getting competitive in this market with the 12th/13th gen chips, because of the heterogeneous efficiency/performance core layout. That said, I pine for an ARM SoC or SBC that has a larger core count, and doesn't have embedded RAM packages, or at least offers at least 32 GB of RAM.
